Audit path
The ordered list of sibling hashes in a Merkle inclusion proof; each entry is tagged left or right so a verifier can recompute the root from a leaf and match it against the published root.
Overview
“Audit path”, a name taken from RFC 6962, is the ordered sequence of sibling hashes that makes up a Merkle inclusion proof. Each entry records the sibling hash and the side it sits on, written as a direction:hash string where the direction is l (left) or r (right), so a verifier never has to derive the sides from a leaf index and a tree size. Entries are ordered from the leaf’s immediate sibling up toward the root, so the number of entries equals the tree depth. A verifier replays the path by repeatedly hashing the running value together with each sibling on its recorded side; if the recomputed root matches the published root, the leaf is proven to be a member of that tree. The full walk, including the domain-separation prefixes it relies on, is described in Merkle inclusion proofs, and the tree it walks is defined by Truestamp’s Merkle tree.