What are Hash Trees? and Why You Should Care

Hash trees, or Merkle trees, proposed by Ralph C. Merkle in 1979, are binary trees where parent nodes are computed from child nodes using one-way hash functions.

Hash trees can be used to build efficient authenticated data structures where a response to a query about the structure comes with a proof that the response is correct.

The talk will give a quick introduction to hash functions and then go on to discuss hash trees and some of the authenticated data structures that can be built based on them.

This is an expanded version of the last year’s "quickie" talk on the same subject.