# Threefish

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Template:Primary sources Template:Infobox block cipher Threefish is a tweakable block cipher designed as part of the Skein hash function, an entry in the NIST hash function competition. Threefish uses no S-boxes or other table lookups in order to avoid cache timing attacks;[1] its nonlinearity comes from alternating additions with exclusive ORs. In that respect, it's similar to Salsa20, TEA, and the SHA-3 candidates CubeHash and BLAKE.

Threefish and the Skein hash function were designed by Bruce Schneier, Niels Ferguson, Stefan Lucks, Doug Whiting, Mihir Bellare, Tadayoshi Kohno, Jon Callas, and Jesse Walker.

## SecurityEdit

In October 2010, an attack that combines rotational cryptanalysis with the rebound attack was published. The attack breaks collision resistance within 53 of 72 rounds in Threefish-256, and 57 of 72 rounds in Threefish-512. It also affects the Skein hash function.[2] This is a follow-up to the earlier attack published in February, which breaks 39 and 42 rounds respectively.[3]

In 2009, a related key boomerang attack against a reduced round Threefish version was published. For the 32-round version, the time complexity is $2^{226}$ and the memory complexity is $2^{12}$; for the 33-round version, the time complexity is $2^{352.17}$ with a negligible memory usage. The attacks also work against the tweaked version of Threefish: for the 32-round version, the time complexity is $2^{222}$ and the memory complexity is $2^{12}$; for the 33-round version, the time complexity is $2^{355.5}$ with a negligible memory usage.[4]