An Overview of Cryptographic Accumulators
It provides a primer for researchers and practitioners needing to select and apply cryptographic accumulators, but it is incremental as it fills a gap in existing literature without introducing new methods.
This paper addresses the lack of a concise survey and practical guide for cryptographic accumulators by describing their properties and discussing their impact on performance metrics like space and time complexity.
This paper is a primer on cryptographic accumulators and how to apply them practically. A cryptographic accumulator is a space- and time-efficient data structure used for set-membership tests. Since it is possible to represent any computational problem where the answer is yes or no as a set-membership problem, cryptographic accumulators are invaluable data structures in computer science and engineering. But, to the best of our knowledge, there is neither a concise survey comparing and contrasting various types of accumulators nor a guide for how to apply the most appropriate one for a given application. Therefore, we address that gap by describing cryptographic accumulators while presenting their fundamental and so-called optional properties. We discuss the effects of each property on the given accumulator's performance in terms of space and time complexity, as well as communication overhead.