I believe the difference (using average hardware) between brute-forcing (which involves hashing each candidate password) and rainbow-ing (which involves just a dictionary lookup) is a lot in terms of time. But I don't have the numbers nor the time to benchmark right now. Time is important in that a db breach will sooner or later be noticed (well...), so it's a race against the user getting notified by db admin and changing their password. Also note that salts can be mixed within the password. Or placed either at the beginning or the end or both. These methods require the hacker to also have access to the in-house algorithm for salting the password, i.e. where and how to intermix. Which depends on many factors.

In reply to Re^4: Replacing crypt() for password login via a digest - looking for stronger alternative by bliako
in thread Replacing crypt() for password login via a digest - looking for stronger alternative by davebaker

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