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Comment by getsat | Hacker News Reader

Rainbow tables don't really matter as much anymore when a consumer-grade GPU can calculate hundreds of millions of SHA/MD hashes per second. You're not really slowing an attacker down anymore.

Whenever this topic comes up, this link should be posted: http://codahale.com/how-to-safely-store-a-password/

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You are off by an order of magnitude: a single GPU can do billions of hashes per second.

HD 6970 = 5.5 billion MD5/s http://golubev.com/gpuest.htm

Wow, the iMac my parents just bought has a 6970m in it. Things have progressed on this front faster than expected.

Re-read the last sentence of my post.

Also, rainbow tables do matter. If you don't protect against them, they immediately become effective again. Your argument is "bump keys exist for locks, better take them off the doors!"

I think the better point here is:

    Bump keys exist for locks, lets not rely on them as a strong point for security.

Rainbow tables are even more useless than I had thought. See: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2546835

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