After Five Decades, The Merkle Tree Still Reigns Supreme

Well, we have developed many methods in cybersecurity over the past five decades, but few can match the power of the Merkle Tree. It is at the core of blockchain and is being proposed as a more simplified way of implementing PKI (Public Key Infrastructure). While RSA and ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) methods are in danger of being cracked by Shor’s algorithm, the hash-based approach of the Merkle Tree is going strong and is quantum robust.

With the Merkle Tree, Google is proposing to publish a Merkle Root for all the valid public keys, and avoid having to use X.509 certificates. So, let’s investigate the Merkle Tree and implement some Zig code to investigate it.

Ralph Merkle

I’ve been lucky to speak to some of the great people who built the foundations for the security of the Internet, and yesterday I spoke with one of the greats: Ralph C Merkle:

Ralph is a co-inventor of public-key cryptography, the inventor of cryptographic hashing, created Merkle’s Puzzles, the co-inventor of the Merkle–Hellman…