Patent ID: 11943237
Assignee: INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION
Field: Digital communication (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H  G | IPC G  H

Claim 14:
15. A non-transitory computer-readable medium comprising one or more instructions that, when executed by one or more processors of a peripheral peer and a plurality of other peripheral peers in a blockchain network, cause the one or more processors to perform:
in parallel, receiving a new sequence of blocks block from an orderer peer of the blockchain network;
in parallel, arranging the sequence of blocks into a batch;
in parallel, identifying that a number of blocks in the sequence is less than a certain threshold batch size, thereby resulting in vacant places in the batch; and
in parallel, calculating hashes of the new sequence of blocks, wherein the vacant places are filled in with hashes of zeros; and
wherein the one or more instructions further cause the one or more processors to perform:
adding the hashes to a Merkle tree of the peripheral peer;
requesting and receiving indices corresponding to the vacant places and root node hashes from Merkle trees of a majority of other peripheral peers of the plurality of other peripheral peers;
identifying the orderer peer as potentially malicious based on identifying that a hash of the received root node hashes is different than a root node hash calculated by the peripheral peer;
in response to the identifying the orderer peer as potentially malicious, requesting receiving the new sequence of blocks from another peripheral peer, of the majority of peripheral peers, corresponding to the different root node hash; and
in response to receiving the new sequence of blocks, verifying the orderer peer as malicious when the new sequence of blocks received from the other peripheral peer is different than the new sequence of blocks received from the orderer peer by the peripheral peer.