Distributed rainbow hash tables

Distributed hash tables are now commonly used in peer to peer file sharing systems. They allow small amounts of data to be referenced quickly and efficiently, and the system easily scales in size. Since it is distributed over thousands of computers, each node only has to store a few hashes.

Rainbow tables are a set of precalculated password hashes, allowing a user to look up a hashed password and retrieve the original plain text password. The system works very well, but it has a couple drawbacks. It takes quite a bit of computational power to create the tables, and they tend to be rather large in size, on the order of a couple terabytes. While many people have taken the time to generate their own tables, they remain fairly difficult to distribute and store due to their size.

A distributed rainbow hash table seems like a perfect match to me. A couple terabytes distributed across the network is next to nothing, and the system yields itself to very fast and efficient lookups. No longer will websites offering hash lookups be swamped with requests, and the distributed nature of the system makes it extremely difficult to prosecute or shut down.