A Review of NTLM Rainbow Table Generation Techniques

Abstract

Rainbow tables reduce the difficulty in brute force cracking a single password by creating a large pre-generated data set of hashes from nearly every possible password Rainbow Tables. This method, known as the Faster Time-Memory Trade-off Technique, is based on research by Martin Hellman & Ronald Rivest done in the early 1980’s on the performance trade-offs between processing time and the memory needed for cryptanalysis. In this paper we review some of the most important works in rainbow table generation and using rainbow tables in window NT environment, i.e. against NTLM. We will discuss how NTLM is weak against rainbow table attacks.

The Dialectics of Science and Magnetism

March 16, 2026