Could many large forks cause a DoS attack on the miner? Suppose it was possible to influence a miner to create many forks.  My understanding is that a miner won't retransmit the fork, but will track it internally.


Where is this information saved in a miner (disk, RAM, etc)?
What protections exist to protect a miner from a resource depletion attack due to forking?
If you mean a miner as in a computer that only does mining, it should be generally as resistant to DOS attacks as any casual computer on the network - it doesn't open its ports.

If you are worried about a standard client being flooded with many blocks and having to store it - the developers did think of that and they put in the checkpoint system. Basically, making a lot of forks of the new blocks would require a lot of computational power and so forth, so it is highly unlikely. However, changing some of the earliest blocks in existence would be dirt cheap nowadays. However, the standard client will not accept any block chain forks that branch out from blocks older than the most recent checkpoint.