Proposal Explorer

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Built for an adversarial prover

Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure and Proofs of useful work for capacity accounting

No new hardware needed

Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure and Proofs of useful work for capacity accounting

Attack testing records published testing for this use. It does not by itself show independent review, a formal proof or that a deployed system is secure.

• Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure: Analysis
• Proofs of useful work for capacity accounting: Analysis

Open significant failures

2 failures in 2 mechanisms

• Outside help during challenges in Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure

  Classic proofs of secure erasure assume the device is isolated during the protocol. Bursuc et al. relax this to a bound on how close a helper can be, enforced by round-trip times. In data centres, remote memory access has round trips of about 1–2 µs, against about 70–200 ns for local DRAM. The MIRI overview therefore says verification depends on ruling out RDMA by latency or physical disconnection. ^{3 4}

  Known failure · Theoretical argument · Significant · Open. On the record

  Related mechanism Research demo Timed challenge-response and memory-occupation challenges: Timed challenges bound how far away a helper can be by how quickly it must answer. A pointer, not evidence that this failure is mitigated. Add

  Related mechanism Research demo Bandwidth limits and compartmentalization: Removing or capping links between groups of accelerators limits remote memory access during a challenge. A pointer, not evidence that this failure is mitigated. Add

• Known shortcuts let a miner claim somewhat more work than it did in Proofs of useful work for capacity accounting

  Pearl's specification lists known mining speedups: crafted inputs, precision shortcuts, seed grinding, work reuse, and faster kernels or hardware. A policy check caps the summands a miner may skip at one-sixteenth of those in a tile. For capacity bounding, any gap between work proven and work possible leaves spare capacity. ¹²

  Known failure · Theoretical argument · Significant · Open. On the record

Scope limitations

• Memory the wipe cannot reach in Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure

  Amodo's inventory of a GB200 system lists many memory stores beyond GPU HBM and host DRAM. It notes that SSD controller DRAM sits on a private bus that host commands cannot read or write, and that its optimized algorithm leaves 25 GiB of HBM unattested. It also asks how switch memory could be wiped. ^{5 6}

  Scope limitation · Open question. On the record

• Gap between erased and total memory in Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure

  Bursuc et al. note that memory left between the erased region and the device's full memory could hold data, and that their bounds are tighter only against a restricted adversary. ³

  Scope limitation · Theoretical argument. On the record

• Proves that work was done, not that no capacity remains in Proofs of useful work for capacity accounting

  Proof-of-work accounting bounds unmonitored compute only relative to an estimate of what the actor has. Attestable states that the verifier "needs a credible estimate of the compute available" to the actor, and that a proof "cannot discover a datacenter that was never declared". ⁹

  Scope limitation · Theoretical argument. On the record

  Related mechanism Proposed Chip registries and manufacturing records: A registry of chips is one basis for the estimate of available compute that the flaw's source says the verifier needs. A pointer, not evidence that this failure is mitigated. Add

  Related mechanism Proposed Remote detection of data centres: Looks for data centres that were never declared, which a proof cannot discover. A pointer, not evidence that this failure is mitigated. Add

Open questions

• Security rests on new hardness assumptions in Proofs of useful work for capacity accounting

  Komargodski and Weinstein base security on hardness assumptions about batches of low-rank random linear equations, and list PoUW "from more standard or well-studied assumptions" as an open problem. Pearl's floating-point variant introduces a further "quantized-subspace hardness" assumption. ^{11 12}

  Open question · Open question. On the record

Not yet demonstrated

Proposed Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure and Proposed Proofs of useful work for capacity accounting

Mechanisms on the map that are not in the proposal. Pointers, not recommendations. ?

• Research demo Bandwidth limits and compartmentalization Add
  • Bears on the open significant failure “Outside help during challenges” in Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure. Removing or capping links between groups of accelerators limits remote memory access during a challenge.
• Research demo Timed challenge-response and memory-occupation challenges Add
  • Bears on the open significant failure “Outside help during challenges” in Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure. Timed challenges bound how far away a helper can be by how quickly it must answer.
  • Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure waits on it. Timed challenges must exclude remote memory and other helpers.

Missing prerequisites

• Research demo Timed challenge-response and memory-occupation challenges needed by Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure Add

Blockers

6 blockers recorded

• Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure
  • Wipes take time: tens of minutes for a pod's volatile memory and hours for SSDs, displacing work. Performance & compatibility ^{4 5 6}
  • Timed challenges must exclude remote memory and other helpers. Coverage & hidden compute. Waits on Timed challenge-response and memory-occupation challenges ^{3 4}
  • All memory stores in a system must be inventoried and wiped at the same time. Coverage & hidden compute ⁵
• Proofs of useful work for capacity accounting
  • Bounding spare capacity needs a credible estimate of the compute available to the actor, including third-party access. Capacity bounds ⁹
  • Proofs of work cannot find facilities that were never declared. Coverage & hidden compute ⁹
  • As of September 2026 no implementation, demonstration or independent evaluation of proofs of work for capacity bounding has been published. Adversarial validation

From the family or selected implementation's record. ?

Model weights

Depends on the design for Proofs of useful work for capacity accounting.

Not involved: Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure.

Inputs and outputs

Depends on the design for Proofs of useful work for capacity accounting.

Not involved: Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure.

Training data

Not involved: Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure and Proofs of useful work for capacity accounting.

Memory wiping and proofs of secure erasure

• Proposed AI 2040 inference-only verification stack Proposed architecture, AI Futures Project
• Proposed Low-trust AI compute verification system overview Proposed architecture, Machine Intelligence Research Institute

Proofs of useful work for capacity accounting

• Operational use Pearl proof-of-useful-work blockchain Open-source project, Pearl Research Labs

1. Verification Plan, R. Dean (2026). Original
2. Secure Code Update for Embedded Devices via Proofs of Secure Erasure, D. Perito & G. Tsudik (2010). Original
3. Software-Based Memory Erasure with Relaxed Isolation Requirements, S. Bursuc et al. (2024). Original
4. A System Overview for Near-Term, Low-Trust AI Compute Verification, N. Cankaya (2026). Original
5. Memory Wipes - Performance Analysis, Amodo Design (2026). Original
6. Improving Disk Wiping Speed for Memory Wipes, Amodo Design (2026). Original
7. Amodo-Design/PoSE-Memory-Wiping (GitHub repository), Amodo Design (2026). Original
8. Empirical Evaluation of Memory-Erasure Protocols, R. Gil-Pons et al. (2025). Original
9. Pacing AI Requires Proof, Attestable (2026). Original
10. Mechanisms to Verify International Agreements About AI Development, A. Scher & L. Thiergart (2025). Original
11. Proofs of Useful Work from Arbitrary Matrix Multiplication, I. Komargodski & O. Weinstein (2025). Original
12. Pearl Floating Point Scheme Specification, Pearl Research Team (2026). Original
13. pearl: Monorepo for the Pearl network, Pearl Research Labs (2026). Original