Seonghyun Kim (Ericsson Research)
Intent-based networking frameworks such as 3GPP TS 28.312 introduce utility-driven fulfilment, where producers map high-level intents to quantitative targets via utility formulas over KPIs, but the relationship between the KPIs declared in the intent expectation and the KPIs used in the utility is unconstrained. We address this Utility–Expectation gap with PICKLE (Patchable InCremental multiproof merKLE tree), a generic hash-only provenance layer for such settings. PICKLE commits an application’s state vector in an incremental Merkle tree and equips each verifier with a batch proof expressed purely in terms of node positions. A single global sibling map stores each required hash at most once, while per-verifier proofs reference this map without duplicating hashes. Leaf updates patch the global map along the affected paths, leaving proof structure unchanged. As a result, patch communication scales with the number of distinct touched siblings rather than with the number or size of verifier batches while preserving per-verifier isolation. We implement PICKLE and compare it to per-path proofs and per-verifier multiproofs on synthetic multi-verifier workloads. Across varied verifier numbers and tree sizes, PICKLE reduces patch communication cost and update time, while relying only on hash computations and simple table lookups.