Construct · 2 fields · 2 citations

Where does rainbow collide?

One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.

● jingle · one word, two constructs Nearest construct by meaning·not indexed
rainbow2 CONSTRUCTSRainbowNUSSENZVEIG · 1977Rainbow tableOECHSLIN · 2003

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1977Rainbow2003Rainbow table
2026

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Atmospheric optics

An arc of colours from light in raindrops

In atmospheric optics a rainbow is the coloured arc seen when sunlight enters spherical raindrops, refracts, reflects once off the back of each drop, and refracts again on exit, with dispersion spreading the colours because each wavelength bends by a slightly different angle; the primary bow sits near 42 degrees from the antisolar point. Nussenzveig's 1977 The theory of the rainbow reviews the optics from geometric rays through the wave treatment that explains the supernumerary bands. The referent is an optical phenomenon in the sky, and it shares nothing with a cracking table beyond the word.[1]

Unit
The angular radius and colour order of the bow
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Predicted from the refractive index of water and drop size, and observed as scattering angle and intensity versus wavelength

Information security

A precomputed table that reverses hashes

In information security a rainbow table is a precomputed structure for reversing cryptographic hashes (typically to recover passwords) that stores long chains of alternating hash and reduction steps and keeps only each chain's endpoints, trading a large one-time computation and moderate storage for fast lookups later. Oechslin's 2003 Making a faster cryptanalytic time-memory trade-off introduced the rainbow variant, which uses many different reduction functions along a chain to cut the collisions that plagued earlier tables. The referent is a time-memory trade-off data structure, named for the multicoloured columns of reduction functions, and it is unrelated to the sky.[2]

Unit
The storage-versus-lookup-time trade-off for inverting a hash
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Characterised by coverage (probability of cracking), table size, chain length, and lookup cost; salting defeats it

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Nearby collisions

chain3 fields · 3 citationsjingle · one word, three constructsdispersion4 fields · 6 citationsjingle · one word, four constructs

References

  1. Nussenzveig, H. M. (1977). The theory of the rainbow. Scientific American, 236(4), 116–127. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0477-116
  2. Oechslin, P. (2003). Making a faster cryptanalytic time-memory trade-off. In Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2003 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2729, pp. 617–630). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-45146-4_36

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