Which of the following would MOST likely be used by an attacker to identify the hash value of a strong password quickly?

Question

Options

• ABrute force
• BKey stretching
• CRainbow table
• DDictionary attack

• A
  5% (1)
• B
  9% (2)
• C
  86% (19)

Explanation

A Rainbow Table is a precomputed database of password hash values. Instead of calculating hashes on the fly, an attacker looks up the captured hash in the table to instantly find the corresponding plaintext password. This makes cracking even complex passwords extremely fast, which is why they are particularly dangerous against systems without salting. Brute force (A) tries every possible character combination but is computationally slow against strong, long passwords. A Dictionary attack (D) uses lists of common words and phrases - effective against weak passwords but fails against strong random ones. Key stretching (B) is actually a defensive technique (used in algorithms like bcrypt/PBKDF2) that makes each hash computation slower, specifically to defeat rainbow tables and brute force attacks. Rainbow tables are the fastest method to reverse known hashes, which is why salted hashing was developed to neutralize them.

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