A rainbow table is a large, precomputed table designed to cache the output of cryptographic hash functions to decrypt hashed passwords into plaintext. The method is based on research from the early 1980s by Martin Hellman and Ronald Rivest that explored the performance trade-offs between processing time and the memory needed for cryptanalysis. Rainbow tables greatly reduce the complexity in cracking large numbers of passwords through a pre-generated data set of password hashes. The larger you make the table, by keeping a larger fraction of passwords, the faster the cracking is.”]