International Association for Cryptologic Research

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Preimage Attacks on up to 5 Rounds of SHA-3 Using Internal Differentials

Authors:
Zhongyi Zhang , State Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Defense, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, People’s Republic of China; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, People’s Republic of China
Chengan Hou , State Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Defense, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, People’s Republic of China; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, People’s Republic of China
Meicheng Liu , State Key Laboratory of Cyberspace Security Defense, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, People’s Republic of China; School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, People’s Republic of China
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Presentation: Slides
Conference: EUROCRYPT 2025
Abstract: In this paper, we study preimage resistance of the SHA-3 standard. We propose a squeeze meet-in-the-middle attack as a new preimage attack method for the sponge functions. This attack combines the squeeze attack and meet-in-the-middle attack, and is implemented by internal differentials. We analyze the inverse operation of the SHA-3 round function, and develop a new target internal differential algorithm as well as a linearization technique for the Sbox in the backward phase. In addition, we propose the concept of a value-difference distribution table (VDDT) to optimize the attack complexity. These techniques lead to faster preimage attacks on five (out of six) SHA-3 functions reduced to 4 rounds, and also bring preimage attacks on 5 rounds of four SHA-3 instances. The attack techniques are verified by performing practical preimage attack on a small variant of 4-round Keccak.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{eurocrypt-2025-35386,
  title={Preimage Attacks on up to 5 Rounds of SHA-3 Using Internal Differentials},
  publisher={Springer-Verlag},
  author={Zhongyi Zhang and Chengan Hou and Meicheng Liu},
  year=2025
}