The Solana Foundation has launched a series of security initiatives, just days after the decentralized finance platform Drift Protocol was hacked for $270 million by a North Korean state-affiliated group. This attack was the result of a six-month social engineering campaign. At the heart of these initiatives is Stride, a structured evaluation program led by Asymmetric Research, which will assess Solana DeFi protocols against eight security pillars and make its findings 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.
While these initiatives address part of the issue exposed by the Drift hack, they do not address the root cause of the loss. The vulnerability in this case was human, with the attackers spending six months building relationships with Drift contributors and compromising their devices through a malicious code repository and a fake TestFlight app. Under Stride, 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.
The level of coverage will be tailored to each protocol's risk profile. 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. In addition to Asymmetric Research, the founding members of SIRN include OtterSec, Neodyme, Squads, and ZeroShadow. The network is available to all Solana protocols but prioritizes those with higher TVL.
Stride's formal verification would not have prevented the North Korean attack, which used compromised devices to obtain multisig approvals that were then locked into durable nonce transactions and executed weeks later. Neither would 24/7 monitoring of on-chain activity, as the transactions were valid by design and indistinguishable from legitimate administrative actions until they were used to drain the vaults.
The attack exploited the gap between on-chain correctness and off-chain human trust, a gap that no smart contract audit or monitoring tool is designed to cover. However, SIRN could have aided in the response. An on-chain security expert, ZachXBT, criticized stablecoin issuer Circle Internet (CRCL) for failing to freeze over $230 million of its stolen dollar-pegged USDC during a six-hour window after the attack began. A dedicated incident response network with established relationships to bridge operators, exchanges, and stablecoin issuers might have shortened the response time.
Whether it would have been fast enough to prevent the Wormhole bridging and obfuscation through Tornado Cash is uncertain. The foundation emphasized that these programs 'do not transfer the underlying responsibility away from the protocols themselves,' a statement that takes on a different meaning after Drift's postmortem revealed that individual contributor devices were the entry point for a nation-state attack.
Solana already offers several free security tools for builders, including Hypernative for threat detection, Range Security for real-time monitoring, and Neodyme's Riverguard for attack simulation.