Automatically generated tamper evident data structures, or Merkle things for free!
I just watched this 2017 gem from Sean Seefried again and thought it may be interesting for the broader Daml and blockchain communities.
Sean shows in this short talk how generalized Merkle data structures can be derived from the Type of the underlying data.
Where could this be useful? For example, in Daml the level of granularity of privacy is contract but in theory it may be possible to encode contracts parameters as these generalized Merkle data structures and selectively discloses specific fields
If you found this interesting, you may also be interested in this post about formally proving Merkle data structures
@Andreas_Lochbihler and myself have a new paper on formally modelling Merkle trees and similar so-called “authenticated data structures” in the theorem prover Isabelle. Such structures allow several systems to ensure that they’re talking about the same structure, even if everyone has only a part of the structure. Yes but why? The reason for the exercise are DAML transactions; there, you can have parties and participant nodes that only see a part of the transaction (their “projections”), but we …
I finally watched this. Can’t believe it took me so long to get around to it.
Thanks for the succinct and easy-to-follow explanation, Sean! It was very enlightening, and I appreciate that you broke down the basics first.
My pleasure.
Welcome to the forum Sean!
