Practical Preimage Attack on 5-Round Keccak[r=640, c=160]

Internal differential cryptanalysis has recently yielded a series of new results in the preimage cryptanalysis of round-reduced Keccak. While these existing attacks share a similar high-level framework, they differ in their technical details. This paper provides a comparative analysis of these prior approaches and introduces a variant framework specifically suitable for 5-round Keccak[r=640, c=160]. This technique integrates certain advantages from prior works, so that the complexity of matching the all-zero initial value and the digest can be separated while the period still remains only one-quarter of the lane size, which avoids the need for a complex Forward-TIDA. Although this technique only provides a constrained application scope, we successfully give the practical preimage attack on 5-round Keccak[r=640, c=160] with the complexity of around 259.7, which firstly solve a 5-round pre-image challenge of the Crunchy Contest.

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Publication Details

Journal
IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology
Published
2026-03-16
DOI
https://doi.org/10.46586/tosc.v2026.i1.189-211
Primary Topic
Cryptographic Implementations and Security
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

Practical Preimage Attack on 5-Round Keccak[r=640, c=160]

Yantian Shen, Enming Dong, Zhengrong Lu, Hongbo Yu et al.
IACR Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology
Cryptographic Implementations and Security
article

Practical Preimage Attack on 5-Round Keccak[r=640, c=160]

Yantian Shen, Enming Dong, Zhengrong Lu, Hongbo Yu, Xiaoen Lin, Chongxu Ren, Wenhao Wu
article en

Abstract

Internal differential cryptanalysis has recently yielded a series of new results in the preimage cryptanalysis of round-reduced Keccak. While these existing attacks share a similar high-level framework, they differ in their technical details. This paper provides a comparative analysis of these prior approaches and introduces a variant framework specifically suitable for 5-round Keccak[r=640, c=160]. This technique integrates certain advantages from prior works, so that the complexity of matching the all-zero initial value and the digest can be separated while the period still remains only one-quarter of the lane size, which avoids the need for a complex Forward-TIDA. Although this technique only provides a constrained application scope, we successfully give the practical preimage attack on 5-round Keccak[r=640, c=160] with the complexity of around 259.7, which firstly solve a 5-round pre-image challenge of the Crunchy Contest.

IACR Transactions on Symmetric CryptologyVol. 2026(1)
Parallel Consulting (United States) (US), Tsinghua University (CN)
National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China
Openalex Percentile: Top 23%
Cryptographic Implementations and Security
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