In response to the recent $270 million exploit of the Drift Protocol, a decentralized finance platform on the Solana network, the Solana Foundation has announced a suite of security measures. This move comes just five days after the attack, which was carried out by a North Korean state-affiliated group using a six-month social engineering campaign. The centerpiece of this initiative is Stride, a structured evaluation program led by Asymmetric Research that will assess Solana DeFi protocols against eight security pillars, with the findings to be made public. Additionally, the Solana Incident Response Network (SIRN) has been introduced, a membership-based group of security firms and researchers focused on real-time crisis response.
While these initiatives address part of the issue exposed by the Drift hack, they do not directly address the human vulnerability that led to the loss. The attackers spent six months building relationships with Drift contributors and compromised their devices through a malicious code repository and a fake TestFlight app. Under Stride, protocols with more than $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. This coverage will be calibrated to each protocol's risk profile.
For protocols with more than $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 founding members of the network include Asymmetric Research, OtterSec, Neodyme, Squads, and ZeroShadow, and it is available to all Solana protocols, prioritized by TVL. However, it's noted that Stride's formal verification would not have caught the North Korean attack, which used compromised devices to obtain multisig approvals that were then locked into durable nonce transactions and executed weeks later. Similarly, 24/7 monitoring of on-chain activity would not have detected the attack, as the transactions were valid by design and indistinguishable from legitimate administrative actions until they were used to drain the vaults.
The attack exploited the gap between on-chain correctness and off-chain human trust, a gap that no smart contract audit or monitoring tool is designed to cover. The Solana Incident Response Network could have potentially helped with the response to the attack. An on-chain security expert, ZachXBT, criticized stablecoin issuer Circle Internet for failing to freeze over $230 million of its stolen dollar-pegged USDC during a six-hour window after the attack began. A dedicated incident response network with established relationships to bridge operators, exchanges, and stablecoin issuers might have shortened the response time.
The foundation has emphasized that these programs do not transfer the underlying responsibility away from the protocols themselves, a point that takes on a different meaning in light of the Drift postmortem, which revealed that individual contributor devices were the entry point for a nation-state attack. 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.