Merkle Trees: Hash Structures in Git and Blockchain
How Merkle trees combine hashes to create tamper-evident structures, and their role in Git, blockchains, and certificate transparency.
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Tags: security, cryptography, data-structures
Merkle Trees: How Blockchains and Git Use Hash Trees A Merkle tree is a data structure where every leaf node contains the hash of a data block, and every non-leaf node contains the hash of its children. The root — a single hash — summarizes the entire data set. This seemingly simple construction solves a surprisingly large number of problems: efficiently proving a piece of data is in a set, detecting which part of a large dataset changed, and making distributed systems tamper-evident. The Construction Start with a set of data blocks. Hash each one. Then pair up the hashes, hash each pair, and repeat until one root hash remains. The notation means concatenation. The root hash is deterministically derived from all the data blocks. Merkle Proofs: Verifying One Element Without Full Data The…
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