8. Efficiency Considerations

8. Efficiency Considerations

The Merkle Tree design serves the purpose of keeping communication overhead low.

Auditing logs for integrity does not require third parties to maintain a copy of each entire log. The Signed Tree Heads can be updated as new entries become available, without recomputing entire trees. Third-party auditors need only fetch the Merkle consistency proofs against a log's existing STH to efficiently verify the append-only property of updates to their Merkle Trees, without auditing the entire tree.