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Merkle trees are data structures devised to authenticate, with a unique signature, a set of messages, by at the same time making an intended verifier able to verify authenticity of a single message without the disclosure of the other messages. In particular, given a set of messages M   =   {m 1,…,m n }, the Merkle tree created with them is a binary tree whose leaves contain the hash value of each message m in M, whereas internal nodes contain the concatenation of the hash values corresponding to its children.
Key Point
A Merkle tree is a data structure introduced by Merkle in 1979 [1] to improve the Lamport-Diffie one-time signature scheme [2]. In this digital signature scheme, keys can be used to sign, at most, one message. This implies that for each signed message a new public key has to be generated and published. As consequence, Lamport-Diffie one-time digital signature scheme requires publishing a large...
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Recommended Reading
Merkle R. Secrecy, authentication, and public key systems. Electrical Engineering, PhD Thesis, Stanford University, 1979.
Lamport L. Constructing digital signatures from a one-way function. Technical Report CSL-98, SRI International, Palo Alto, 1979.
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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Carminati, B. (2009). Merkle Trees. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1492
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1492
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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