In the wake of a $270 million exploit on the Drift Protocol, the Solana Foundation has unveiled a robust suite of security measures. This move comes just five days after the decentralized finance platform was targeted by a North Korean state-affiliated group, which successfully carried out a six-month social engineering campaign.
The cornerstone of this new initiative is Stride, a rigorous evaluation program led by Asymmetric Research, designed to assess Solana DeFi protocols against eight critical security pillars, with findings to be made publicly available. Additionally, the Solana Incident Response Network (SIRN) has been introduced, a membership-based collective of security firms and researchers focused on providing real-time crisis response.
While these measures address aspects of the vulnerability exposed by the Drift exploit, they do not directly address the human element that was compromised, as the attackers built relationships with Drift contributors over six months, ultimately compromising their devices through malicious means. Under the Stride program, protocols with over $10 million in total value locked that pass the evaluation will be eligible for ongoing operational security and active threat monitoring, funded by Solana Foundation grants, with the level of coverage tailored to each protocol's specific risk profile.
For larger protocols with over $100 million in total value locked, the foundation will also provide funding for formal verification, a meticulous mathematical process that verifies every possible execution path in a smart contract to ensure correctness. The founding members of SIRN include notable security firms such as OtterSec, Neodyme, Squads, and ZeroShadow, with the network available to all Solana protocols, prioritized based on total value locked.
Although Stride's formal verification would not have prevented the North Korean attack, which exploited compromised devices to obtain multisig approvals that were later locked into durable nonce transactions, the Solana Incident Response Network could have potentially enhanced the response to the incident. The introduction of these security measures underscores the evolving landscape of cryptocurrency security and the need for robust, multi-layered defenses against increasingly sophisticated threats.