🔓 We ran genuine quantum key-recovery on 'real IBM quantum hardware' — and pushed the frontier well past the largest hardware demos we're aware of (which sat at N=4).
Using Simon's algorithm on ibm_kingston, we recovered the secret key of two symmetric-cipher structures: • Even–Mansour — N=5 → N=10 • 3-round Feistel (DES-family) — block 6 → 8
Each verified against an 'independent control key', using error mitigation only (no QEC).
🧭 Honest scope: this is not a quantum speedup (the effective difficulty tracks the classical birthday bound ~2^{n/2}), not a break of real AES/RSA, and not 16-round DES (ours is 3-round). The recovery method is reserved for a forthcoming paper; formal record status is pending peer review.