Merkle tree

2001, Josep Domingo-Ferrer, Mobile Agent Route Protection through Hash-Based Mechanisms, C. Pandu Rangan, Cunsheng Ding (editors), Progress in Cryptology - INDOCRYPT 2001: 2nd International Conference, Proceedings, Volume 2, Springer, LNCS 2247, page 17, The second solution uses Merkle trees and minimizes the cost of route protection by the agent owner, so that a single digital signature suffices to protect the whole route; for hosts along the route, the verification cost is similar to the cost of previous schemes in the literature, namely one digital signature verification per route step.

2004, Michael Szydlo, Merkle Tree Traversal in Log Space and Time, Christian Cachin, Jan Camenisch (editors), Advances in Cryptology - EUROCRYPT 2004: International Conference, Proceedings, Springer, LNCS 3027, page 541, Merkle trees have found many uses in theoretical cryptographic constructions, having been specifically designed so that a leaf value can be verified with respect to a publicly known root value and the authentication data of the leaf.