4 ms·

You could reconstruct that any way you want to later.

• gumby 6y ago
  Yes, you'd need to have separate storage for intermediate product (or at least periodic incremental hashes) to ensure against tampering. The meatspace chain of control rules would likely be adequate (at least to the current state of the legal art) to handle the two, were they stored separately.
  • cryptonector 6y ago
    This would require regulation of these devices, and they would have to have adequate hardware protection of the keys used to secure these Merkle hash trees.
    • gumby 6y ago
      Not really: if you copied them to a pair of USB keys, those could be handled like other physical evidence. The point of the Merkle tree in this case is just to make tampering much more difficult/ easier to suspect; independent entities could hash he result and compare for evidence of tampering. This isn’t a case of absolute perfection, this is bringing things up to the current standard (aka “state of he art”) WRT courts and police procedure. Sure, one could design all sorts of additional mechanisms (error correcting codes in the trees etc) but realistically, it’s tamper detection that matters, and it only needs to be as good as paper, candlesticks, fingerprints (sigh) or whatever else is already customary in the evidence room.
      • cryptonector 6y ago
        If you have no cryptographic protection then it's just a matter of writing code to tamper with the thing leaving no evidence of that tampering behind.