In response to the recent $270 million exploit of the Drift Protocol, the Solana Foundation has unveiled a suite of security measures aimed at bolstering the network's defenses. The centerpiece of this initiative is Stride, a thorough evaluation program led by Asymmetric Research that will assess Solana DeFi protocols against eight key security pillars and publicly disclose its findings. Additionally, the foundation has introduced the Solana Incident Response Network (SIRN), a membership-based group of security experts and researchers focused on providing real-time crisis response. While these 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 perpetrators, a North Korean state-affiliated group, 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 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.
Protocols with over $100 million in TVL will also be eligible for formal verification, a mathematical method that checks every possible execution path in a smart contract to guarantee correctness. The SIRN network, which includes founding members such as OtterSec, Neodyme, Squads, and ZeroShadow, will be available to all Solana protocols, with priority given to those with higher TVL.
Although the Stride program's formal verification would not have prevented the North Korean attack, which exploited the gap between on-chain correctness and off-chain human trust, the SIRN network could have potentially aided in the response efforts. 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.