The article says they hit AES, which doesn’t make much sense. Block ciphers aren’t vulnerable to QC in the same way as public key crypto. Even so far as Grover’s Algorithm would help at all, it’s far from being practical.
In many cases the key exchange (kex) for symmetric ciphers are done using slower asymmetric ciphers. Many of which are vulnerable to quantum algos to various degrees.
So even when attacking AES you’d ideally do it indirectly by targeting the kex.
You attack kex, so dh or rsa (ie shors) , which we’re moving away from (very slowly).
Ecc is better for similar keylengths, but you need lattice to really resist quantum.
My guess they hit old rsa, still a standard but being deprecated everywhere.
You can’t really hit the sboxes, they’re just this side of otp.
Key exchange is mostly discrete logarithm, ie you use modulo to hide/destroy data making it hard for anyone to figure it out without guessing wildly.
The article says they hit AES, which doesn’t make much sense. Block ciphers aren’t vulnerable to QC in the same way as public key crypto. Even so far as Grover’s Algorithm would help at all, it’s far from being practical.
In many cases the key exchange (kex) for symmetric ciphers are done using slower asymmetric ciphers. Many of which are vulnerable to quantum algos to various degrees.
So even when attacking AES you’d ideally do it indirectly by targeting the kex.