I don't understand your line of reasoning. Aren't rainbow tables just another kind of brute force attack? They just allow you to share the brute force across a

I don't understand your line of reasoning. Aren't rainbow tables just another kind of brute force attack? They just allow you to share the brute force across a large number of passwords. Salts increase the effective length of the password, and per-password salts eliminate rainbow tables and make brute forcing harder as well. What am I missing? --- Linkedin now says their passwords are salted, so we could change our passwords now even if I was right. But they're also claiming that all passwords are now salted. http://blog.linkedin.com/2012/06/06/linkedin-member-passwords-compromised http://blog.linkedin.com/2012/06/06/linkedin-member-password... In any case, I'm enjoying this conversation, thanks.