In the wake of a $270 million exploit on the Drift Protocol, a decentralized finance platform, the Solana Foundation has unveiled a comprehensive suite of security initiatives. The new measures, announced just five days after the hack, are designed to bolster the security of Solana's DeFi protocols.
A key component of the initiative is Stride, a structured evaluation program led by Asymmetric Research that will assess Solana DeFi protocols against eight security pillars and publish its findings publicly. Additionally, the Solana Foundation has introduced the Solana Incident Response Network (SIRN), a membership-based group of security firms and researchers focused on real-time crisis response.
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 but prioritized by TVL. While these initiatives address part of the problem exposed by the Drift hack, they do not directly address the human vulnerability that was exploited.
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 was careful to note that the programs do not transfer the underlying responsibility away from the protocols themselves. The foundation already hosts several free security tools for builders, including Hypernative for threat detection, Range Security for real-time monitoring, and Neodyme's Riverguard for attack simulation.