OMT : A Dynamic Authenticated Data Structure for Security Kernels

Abstract

We introduce a family of authenticated data structures-Ordered Merkle Trees (OMT)-and illustrate their utility in security kernels for a wide variety of subsystems. Specifically, the utility of two types of OMTs: a) the index ordered merkle tree (IOMT) and b) the range ordered merkle tree (ROMT), are investigated for their suitability in security kernels for various subsystems of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the Internet's inter-autonomous system routing infrastructure. We outline simple generic security kernel functions to maintain OMTs, and subsystem specific security kernel functionality for BGP subsystems (like registries, autonomous system owners, and BGP speakers/routers), that take advantage of OMTs.

A Scalable, Trustworthy Infrastructure for Collaborative Container Repositories

“…An index-ordered Merkle tree (IOMT) [23,25] corrects this last deficiency of ordinary Merkle trees by treating leaf records as a virtual circularly-linked list, which facilitates proofs of nonexistence while maintaining other desirable properties of Merkle trees, such as logarithmic update/verification time.…”