I’m happy to announce the alpha release of Braids.jl, a braid theory library for Julia.

Braid theory is an abstract mathematical study arising from the everyday notion of a braid – just like in a girl’s hair, or in the fibers woven together to form a rope. Braids, organized by the number of strands in the braid, form a group whose study has recently become of particular interest in cryptography, as some post-quantum encryption standards rely on the difficulty of problems in the braid group.

A mathematical braid looks like this:

And the braid group is formed by taking these simple braids and stringing them together. Here’s another braid:

Now, if we take the first one and attach it by its endpoints to the second, follow where the strings go and you’ll see what we get is this:

This is how we do math with braids. Emil Artin gave specific rules for the manipulation of braids, and those rules allow us to build results about braids without any string at all. For example, two braids can be considered “equivalent” if one can be deformed into the other without breaking any strings. Braid groups give us the ability to mathematically compute whether two braids have this property – if they are “ambient isotopic,” to use the lingo – given the reduction of Dehornoy implemented in Braids.jl , which is based on Artin’s rules of braids.

Braids have been studied extensively as a possible base group for post-quantum cryptography. For example, the conjugacy search problem is (pretty) hard in braids. This problem is essentially, given two braids a and b, find a braid c such that composing c then a and then the mirror image of c gives us precisely the braid b. It was for some time believed this problem was difficult enough to form the basis of a post-quantum cryptosystem, but algorithms have since been discovered that can attack “weak braids” and make the system not provably secure.

It is an open question to what extent braids can be applied in cryptography – and one I personally care a lot about, which is what motivated me to build Braids.jl . I hope a platform for manipulating braids on top of Julia – which gives researchers the power of massively parallel computing if necessary, or near-C speed at the very least – will help stimulate just that sort of research.