Review and Investigation of Merkle Tree’s Technical Principles and Related Application Fields

In cryptography, many different data structures are used to store and encrypt data. Merkle Tree is such a data structure that provides a way to prove data integrity and validity. It requires less memory or disk space than other data structures, resulting in simple and fast computation. This paper first explains the detailed principles and then introduces the application fields of Merkle Tree. Merkle Tree uses the hash value of the data block as leaf node tags and the encrypted hash of the child node tags as other node tags. As data structures evolve and innovate, Merkle Tree provides help and inspiration for the future new data structures. Furthermore, we investigate various applications using Merkle Tree technology, including Smart Grid, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Interplanetary File System, Image Authentication, Public Security Audit of Cloud Computing, SIMulator for Blockchain Applications, Hardware Memory Integrity, and Certificate Transparency. These researches show that Merkle Tree applies to a wide range of fields and has great potential. In brief, the paper aims to help researchers better understand the Merkle Tree features and various roles and effects in different environments, contributing to the development of cryptography.