Abstract At FSE 2008, Leurent introduced the preimage attack on MD4 by exploiting differential trails. In this paper, we apply the differential-aided preimage attack to Keccak with the message modification techniques. Instead of directly finding the preimage, we exploit differential characteristics to modify the messages, so that the differences of their hashing values and the changes of given target can be controlled. By adding some constraints, a trail can be used to change one bit at a time and reduce the time complexity by a factor of 2. When the number of rounds increases, we introduce two-stage modification techniques to satisfy part of constraints as well. In order to solve other constraints, we also combine the linear-structure technique and accordingly give a preimage attack on 5-round Keccak[$r=1440,c=160,l=80$].