[Barker, Elaine B.] NIST Publication Announcements

[Perry E. Metzger]

"James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com> writes:
>>> The Haber & Stornetta scheme provides a timestamping
>>> service that doesn't require terribly much trust,
>>> since hard to forge widely witnessed events delimit
>>> particular sets of timestamps. The only issue is
>>> getting sufficient granularity.
>
>> I don't know if their scheme was patented in Germany.
>> It was in the U.S., though I think that at least some
>> of the patents expire within the year.
>
> In looking this up, I have noticed a pile of patents
> that patent something equivalent or near equivalent to a
> patricia hash tree, or elaborately disguised patricia
> trees, or something suspiciously similar to a patricia
> hash tree, and various special cases of it, and
> applications of it, without using the name "patricia
> hash tree"

Perhaps that's because this is a Merkle tree, not a patricia
tree. Patricia trees are radix trees -- they're used for optimizing
routing tables, not in cryptography.

Perry

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