In response to the recent $270 million exploit of the Drift Protocol, the Solana Foundation has announced a series of security measures aimed at bolstering the network's defenses. The Drift exploit, carried out by a North Korean state-affiliated group, was the result of a six-month social engineering campaign that targeted individual contributors, rather than a direct attack on the protocol's smart contracts. The new security measures, which include the Stride evaluation program and the Solana Incident Response Network (SIRN), are designed to address some of the vulnerabilities exposed by the Drift exploit.
However, they may not have been sufficient to prevent the attack, which exploited the gap between on-chain security and off-chain human trust. The Stride program will assess Solana DeFi protocols against eight security pillars and publish its findings publicly, while the SIRN will provide a dedicated incident response network for security firms and researchers. Protocols with over $10 million in total value locked (TVL) that pass the evaluation will receive ongoing operational security and active threat monitoring, with coverage calibrated to each protocol's risk profile. Additionally, protocols with over $100 million in TVL will be eligible for formal verification, a mathematical method that checks every possible execution path in a smart contract to guarantee correctness.
The Solana Foundation has emphasized that these programs do not transfer the underlying responsibility away from the protocols themselves, and that individual protocols must still take steps to ensure their own security.