Security Improvement in a Modified Merkle-tree: Computation and Storage Comparison Between Different Cloud Providers

Two of the very well-known hash algorithms from SHA2 (SHA-2) family include SHA-256 and SHA-512. Nowadays, there exists another hash algorithms family -- SHA3(SHA-3), which includes SHA3-256 and SHA3-512 algorithms, also known as Keccak algorithms. This paper provides a comparison of the empirical performance calculations with these 4 algorithms with different input volumes of sequential data (where every next slice of information is dependent of previous one) to make it impossible for parallel computation. For the purpose of calculations, 4 totally different environments are used but with exact number of CPUs and approximately similar amount of memory (using only standard instances types) -- one personal computer from one side and 3 of the biggest public cloud providers from another -- Amazon AWS (t2.medium), Microsoft Azure (Standard D2s v3) and Google Cloud (n1-standard-2). The purpose of the research is to compare these environments in terms of additional compute calculations and additional storage space (volumes and prices) for the presented new security improvement of the Merkle-root calculation. The Merkle-root is an integral part of the blockchain and therefore, security improvement of this component is a security improvement of the whole blockchain structure.