In the wake of a $270 million exploit on the Drift Protocol, a decentralized finance platform, the Solana Foundation has unveiled a range of security measures. The announcement comes just five days after the attack, which was carried out by a North Korean state-affiliated group using a six-month social engineering campaign. The centerpiece of the initiative is Stride, a structured evaluation program led by Asymmetric Research that will assess Solana DeFi protocols against eight security pillars and publish its findings publicly.
Additionally, the Solana Incident Response Network (SIRN) has been introduced, a membership-based group of security firms and researchers focused on 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 mathematical method that checks every possible execution path in a smart contract to guarantee correctness.
The network is available to all Solana protocols but prioritized by TVL. While these measures address part of the problem exposed by the Drift exploit, they do not address the human vulnerability that led to the loss.
The attackers spent six months building relationships with Drift contributors and compromised their devices through a malicious code repository and a fake TestFlight app. The initiatives may help prevent similar attacks in the future, but the gap between onchain correctness and offchain human trust remains a challenge.