In response to the recent $270 million exploit of the Drift Protocol, the Solana Foundation has unveiled a range of security measures. The cornerstone of this initiative is Stride, a structured evaluation program led by Asymmetric Research, which will assess the security of Solana DeFi protocols against eight key pillars and publicly disclose its findings. Additionally, the Solana Incident Response Network (SIRN) has been established, comprising a membership-based group of security firms 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 root cause of the exploit, which was a result of human error rather than a flaw in the smart contracts or code.
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. 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, with coverage tailored to each protocol's risk profile.
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 the network include Asymmetric Research, OtterSec, Neodyme, Squads, and ZeroShadow. Although Stride's formal verification would not have prevented the North Korean attack, which exploited the gap between onchain correctness and offchain human trust, the Solana Incident Response Network could have potentially improved the response time to the attack.
The foundation has emphasized that these programs do not transfer 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.