In response to the recent $270 million exploit of Drift Protocol, the Solana Foundation has launched a comprehensive suite of security initiatives. The program, unveiled just five days after the attack, is designed to bolster the security of Solana's decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. At the heart of the initiative is Stride, a rigorous evaluation program led by Asymmetric Research that will assess Solana DeFi protocols against eight key security pillars and make its findings publicly available.
Additionally, the Solana Incident Response Network (SIRN) has been established as 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 address the human element that was exploited in the attack. The attackers had spent six months building relationships with Drift contributors and compromised their devices through malicious means.
Under the Stride program, 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, with priority given to those with higher TVL. Founding members of SIRN include OtterSec, Neodyme, Squads, and ZeroShadow.
Although Stride's formal verification would not have prevented the North Korean attack, which exploited compromised devices to obtain multisig approvals, the Solana Incident Response Network could have potentially shortened the response time to the attack. The foundation has emphasized that these programs do not shift the underlying responsibility away from the protocols themselves, highlighting the importance of individual contributor device security in preventing such attacks. 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.