The Solana Foundation has announced a range of security measures, just days after the decentralized finance platform Drift Protocol suffered a $270 million hack at the hands of a North Korean state-affiliated group. This group had conducted a six-month social engineering campaign prior to the exploit. At the heart of the initiative is Stride, a structured evaluation program led by Asymmetric Research, which will assess Solana DeFi protocols against eight key security pillars and publicly disclose its findings. 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 some of the vulnerabilities exposed by the Drift hack, they do not directly tackle the root cause of the loss. The smart contracts of Drift were not compromised, and the code had passed audits. The vulnerability was instead human in nature: the attackers spent six months building relationships with Drift contributors and compromised their devices through a malicious code repository and a fake TestFlight app. Under the Stride program, protocols with more than $10 million in total value locked (TVL) that pass the evaluation will be eligible for 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 provide funding for formal verification, a mathematical method that checks every possible execution path in a smart contract to guarantee correctness.
The founding members of SIRN include Asymmetric Research, OtterSec, Neodyme, Squads, and ZeroShadow. While the network is available to all Solana protocols, priority will be given based on TVL.
The formal verification aspect of Stride, however, would not have prevented the North Korean attack, which utilized compromised devices to obtain multisig approvals that were then locked into durable nonce transactions and executed weeks later. Similarly, 24/7 monitoring of on-chain activity would not have detected the attack, 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. On the other hand, SIRN could have potentially aided in the response to the attack. 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. However, it is uncertain whether it would have been fast enough to prevent the Wormhole bridging and obfuscation through Tornado Cash.
The foundation emphasized that the programs 'do not transfer the underlying responsibility away from the protocols themselves,' a statement that takes on a different meaning in light of Drift's postmortem, which 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.