The Solana Foundation has launched a range of security measures, just days after the decentralized finance platform Drift Protocol suffered a significant $270 million exploit by a North Korean state-affiliated group. This attack was carried out after a six-month social engineering campaign. The foundation's new security program, Stride, is a structured evaluation initiative led by Asymmetric Research. It will assess Solana DeFi protocols against eight key security pillars, with the findings made publicly available.
Additionally, the Solana Incident Response Network (SIRN) has been introduced, a membership-based group of security firms and researchers focused on providing real-time crisis response. Protocols with over $10 million in total value locked (TVL) that pass the evaluation will receive ongoing operational security and active threat monitoring, funded by Solana Foundation grants.
For protocols with over $100 million in TVL, the foundation will also fund formal verification, a method that checks every possible execution path in a smart contract to ensure correctness. Founding members of the network include Asymmetric Research, OtterSec, Neodyme, Squads, and ZeroShadow, with the network available to all Solana protocols, prioritized by TVL.
While these initiatives address part of the issue exposed by the Drift exploit, they do not cover the human element that led to the loss. The attackers had spent six months building relationships with Drift contributors, compromising their devices through malicious code and fake apps. The Solana Foundation's new measures aim to enhance security, but the Drift incident highlights the gap between on-chain security and off-chain human trust, which no smart contract audit or monitoring tool can fully address.