In response to the recent $270 million Drift Protocol exploit, the Solana Foundation has launched a series of security initiatives aimed at bolstering the network's defenses. The new measures include Stride, a comprehensive evaluation program led by Asymmetric Research, which will assess Solana DeFi protocols against eight key security pillars and publish the results publicly.
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. Protocols with over $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. For larger protocols with over $100 million in TVL, the foundation will also fund formal verification, a rigorous 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. While these new measures 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 a malicious code repository and a fake TestFlight app. The Solana Foundation's new initiatives do not transfer the underlying responsibility away from the protocols themselves, emphasizing the importance of individual protocol security.
The foundation 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.