A Novel Rainbow Table Sorting Method

As users become increasingly aware of the need to adopt strong password, it also brings challenges to digital forensics investigators due to the password protection of potential evidence data. In this paper, we discuss existing password recovery methods and propose a new password sorting method that aid in improving the performance of the recovery process. This improved method supports a quick binary search instead of the slower linear search as employed in the enhanced rainbow table. We show that this method will result in a 23% reduction in storage requirement, compared to the original rainbow tables, while maintaining the same success rate. It is also an improve- ment over the enhanced rainbow table as the time taken for the password lookup will be drastically reduced.