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.
Authors
- Yantian Shen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6714-3557)
- Enming Dong
- Zhengrong Lu
- Hongbo Yu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8500-5991)
- Xiaoen Lin
- Chongxu Ren
- Wenhao Wu
Institutions
- Parallel Consulting (United States) (US)
- Tsinghua University (CN)
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
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China