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

Claim 7:
8. A method, comprising:
in parallel, receiving, by a peripheral peer and a plurality of other peripheral peers in a blockchain network, 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, by the peripheral peer and the plurality of other peripheral peers, hashes of the new sequence of blocks; and
wherein the method further comprises:
adding, by the peripheral peer, the hashes to a Merkle tree of the peripheral peer;
requesting and receiving, by the peripheral peer, 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, by the peripheral peer, the orderer peer as potentially malicious based on identifying that a root node hash of the received root node hashes is different than a hash calculated by the peripheral peer;
in response to the identifying the orderer peer as potentially malicious, requesting, by the peripheral peer, 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, by the peripheral peer, 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.