Literature about Merkle hash tries?

[Benja Fallenstein]

Hi Greg--

Greg Rose wrote:
> At 01:14 AM 10/1/2003 +0300, Benja Fallenstein wrote:
>> So, anyway, anybody know references? I've not come across any yet.
> 
> I know that the technique dates back (at least) to IBM in the 60s.

Cool-- but--

On second thoughts, do you mean *cryptographic* hash tries or hash tries 
or plain tries? I know literature on both tries and hash tries (Knuth 
claimed to have invented the latter in an Literate Programming exercise) 
but not on using cryptographic hash functions & a Merkle hash tree.

Reason for my second thoughts is that Merkle's patent on hash trees 
dates in the 80s ;-)

> I used to know the name of the inventor but can't bring it to mind at the 
> moment. The Berkeley UNIX library dbm uses essentially this philosophy, 
> but the tree is not binary; rather each node stores up to one disk 
> block's worth of pointers. Nodes split when they get too full. When the 
> point is to handle a lot of data, this makes much more sense.

(In Merkle hash trees, on the other hand, signature size is minimized 
when using a binary tree, at least if I'm not confused right now. :) )

Thanks,
- Benja

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com