The Bloom Tree
This addresses a specific issue in secure data verification for applications like distributed systems or blockchain, but it is incremental as it combines existing concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of efficiently verifying the presence or absence of elements in a set with security and bandwidth efficiency, resulting in a data structure that uses compact Merkle multiproofs to reduce transmission needs compared to sending entire Bloom filters.
We introduce a data structure that allows for efficient (probabilistic) presence proofs and non-probabilistic absence proofs in a bandwidth efficient and secure way. The Bloom tree combines the idea of Bloom filters with that of Merkle trees. Bloom filters are used to verify the presence, or absence of elements in a set. In the case of the Bloom tree, we are interested to verify and transmit the presence, or absence of an element in a secure and bandwidth efficient way to another party. Instead of sending the whole Bloom filter to check for the presence, or absence of an element, the Bloom tree achieves efficient verification by using a compact Merkle multiproof.