We’d like to introduce VRF-based mining, a surprisingly simple and effective way of making pooled mining impossible. Instead of using hash functions, we use Verifiable Random Functions (VRFs) for proof-of-work-based consensus. As VRF binds the authorship with hashes, a pool operator should reveal his private key to outsource the mining process to miners, and miners can easily steal cryptocurrency in the pool operator’s wallet anonymously.
A known issue (credit to @ChengWang): The miner should keep the secret key in memory all the time in order to mine. This may give opportunities for attackers to steal the secret key.
For example, the mining software has a bug, and the attacker can exploit this bug to access the memory space of the process of the mining software.
A possible solution is to use Oblivious RAM (ORAM), but maybe there are more elegant ways?
Correct, using enclaves can be a good solution. Here the enclave should just protect read operations on the secret key, so it is unnecessary to be general-purpose (like SGX). Maybe this simplifies the design of ASIC specialised for VRF-based mining?
I’m not an enclave expert but it does seem like you get simplification in the ASIC design if your enclave is only for managing private keys, instead of a general purpose enclave.