QuantumOS: An Even-Mansour Key-Recovery Demo on Real Quantum Hardware (and What It Is Not)
Cryptanalysis on real quantum hardware
QuantumOS is VIDRAFT's quantum-computing research line. The headline experiment: a key-recovery demonstration against the Even-Mansour construction, run on real IBM quantum hardware at N=10 qubits. The work was referenced in SemiEngineering's weekly industry review (external reference).
What Even-Mansour is, and what we did
Even-Mansour is a minimalist block-cipher construction - a public permutation wrapped by two XOR'd secret keys. It is a favorite target for quantum cryptanalysis research because its structure is clean enough to study on the small, noisy quantum machines that exist today. We implemented a key-recovery attack and ran it end-to-end on actual quantum hardware, not just a simulator.
What this is NOT
Being blunt, because this is the area where quantum claims get oversold:
- This is a small-scale demonstration at N=10 qubits. It is not a practical attack.
- It does not break AES, RSA, elliptic-curve, or any cryptography deployed in the real world.
- It is not a demonstration of quantum speedup at any useful scale. Running on real hardware proves the circuit executes and returns the expected structure under noise - it does not prove an advantage over classical machines.
Nothing you use is weaker because this experiment ran. The value is scientific: validating that these attacks can be expressed and executed on today's hardware, and building the tooling and intuition for when the machines get bigger.
Why run it on real hardware at all
Simulators are convenient and, for 10 qubits, arguably easier. Running on physical hardware forces you to confront noise, decoherence, and error rates that a clean simulator hides. That is the point: the interesting research question is not "does the math work" (it does, on paper) but "what survives on a real, noisy device, and what breaks." Answering that now is how you are ready when qubit counts and fidelity improve.
Sibling research lines
QuantumOS sits alongside two other VIDRAFT research efforts that share the same run-real-physics-on-emerging-hardware mindset:
- PharmaOS - drug-discovery research.
- MaterialsOS - materials research.
All three are research-stage.
Honest scope
The Even-Mansour result is a research-stage, small-scale (N=10) hardware demonstration. It is explicitly not a practical quantum attack, not a speedup claim, and not a break of any deployed cryptosystem - do not read it as "quantum computers can break encryption now," because that is false. The SemiEngineering mention is an industry-review reference, not a peer-reviewed endorsement of a cryptographic break. PharmaOS and MaterialsOS are likewise early-stage research lines, mentioned here for context, not as shipping products. Quantum hardware today is small and noisy; honest reporting of that constraint is part of the work.
More: https://vidraft.net
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