Which attack does salting primarily defend against?

• A. Brute force attack
• B. Rainbow table attack
• C. Phishing
• D. Man-in-the-middle

Answer: (B)

Salting password hashes adds unique randomness to each password before hashing, so that even identical passwords yield different stored hashes. This makes precomputed attack tables, like rainbow tables, ineffective because those tables rely on matching a hash to a password; with a different salt for each account, you’d need a separate rainbow table for every salt, which is impractical to build and store.

Brute-force guessing can still work against salted hashes, but the salt forces the attacker to compute hashes separately for each account, increasing the overall effort required. Phishing and man-in-the-middle attacks are unrelated to this defense, as they target social engineering or interception rather than cracking stored password hashes.