Quote from: Raulo on July 07, 2011, 07:59:01 AM

OK, I have not used pools for a long time but if they return a valid getwork (and they should), then getwork returns the block header. The hash of the previous block is there.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_hashing_algorithm

Pools only need to manipulate the target hash so the miners submit all the hashes of difficult 1 and above
The attacker may try to spoof the data block, but then the hash of the data would differ from the midstate.

The hash of the "previous block" in the getwork reply is actually completely opaque data to a pool miner, who cannot verifies whether it is legitimate or not. One reason being that it varies based on unpredictable data that is known by no one else but the pool owner (eg. the 50 BTC generation fee transaction).

The only way to prevent the pool vulnerability I described is, as pointed out by DamienBlack, a significant rework of the getwork & pool interface: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9137.0