Rainbow tables and wordlists are the bedrock of any password cracking software. Rainbow tables are a precomputed table of hashes with some sort of encoding function, such as Base64, for example. Hash tables are a hash of each word stored within a table. They are often confused with each other. Both are used for reverse-engineering cryptographic hash functions. The purpose of these tables is to crack password hashes. Rainbow tables and hash tables are typically used against a hash file that has been downloaded. They tend to be used for offline attacks.

Rainbow tables are typically very good for harder passwords, while hash tables tend to work better for simple, more common passwords.Wordlists are just that: a list of passwords that will be tried against the system in real time. Because of this, wordlists are typically used in online attacks...