Category of vulnerabilities where program authorization checks are insufficient or missing, allowing unauthorized users to execute privileged operations. Includes missing signer checks, owner checks, PDA validation, and constraint violations. The most common class of critical Solana program vulnerabilities.
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Category of vulnerabilities where program authorization checks are insufficient or missing, allowing unauthorized users to execute privileged operations. Includes missing signer checks, owner checks, PDA validation, and constraint violations. The most common class of critical Solana program vulnerabilities.
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Access Control Bypass (access-control-bypass) Category: Security Definition: Category of vulnerabilities where program authorization checks are insufficient or missing, allowing unauthorized users to execute privileged operations. Includes missing signer checks, owner checks, PDA validation, and constraint violations. The most common class of critical Solana program vulnerabilities. Related: Missing Signer Check, Missing Owner Check, Privilege Escalation
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A vulnerability where a program accepts an account in a privileged role (e.g., admin, authority, payer) without verifying that the account actually signed the transaction, allowing any caller to impersonate that authority by simply passing the target pubkey as an instruction account. In native Solana programs, the check requires asserting account.is_signer == true; in Anchor, the Signer<'info> type enforces this automatically. Exploitation lets an attacker bypass all access control gated on authority equality checks, making it one of the most critical and commonly audited vulnerabilities in Solana programs.
A vulnerability where a program deserializes and trusts account data without first confirming that the account is owned by the expected program, allowing an attacker to substitute a maliciously crafted account owned by a different program whose byte layout happens to satisfy the deserialization. On Solana, every account stores a 32-byte owner field set to the program that created it; native programs must assert account.owner == &expected_program_id, while Anchor's Account<'info, T> wrapper performs this check automatically. Failure to validate ownership can lead to complete auth bypass if an attacker can construct a fake account whose data parses into a struct with elevated privileges.
A class of vulnerabilities where an attacker gains a higher level of authority than legitimately granted — for example, forging admin access, hijacking a program's upgrade authority, or obtaining a PDA signer without possessing the seeds that should gate it. On Solana, common vectors include missing signer checks (an account is treated as an authority without asserting is_signer), misconfigured multisig authority accounts, and upgrade authority mismanagement (leaving a program upgradeable by a hot wallet instead of a governance multisig or burning the upgrade authority entirely). Programs should enforce the principle of least privilege by using immutable upgrade authorities or time-locked governance for high-value programs.
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A vulnerability where a program accepts an account in a privileged role (e.g., admin, authority, payer) without verifying that the account actually signed the transaction, allowing any caller to impersonate that authority by simply passing the target pubkey as an instruction account. In native Solana programs, the check requires asserting account.is_signer == true; in Anchor, the Signer<'info> type enforces this automatically. Exploitation lets an attacker bypass all access control gated on authority equality checks, making it one of the most critical and commonly audited vulnerabilities in Solana programs.
A vulnerability where a program deserializes and trusts account data without first confirming that the account is owned by the expected program, allowing an attacker to substitute a maliciously crafted account owned by a different program whose byte layout happens to satisfy the deserialization. On Solana, every account stores a 32-byte owner field set to the program that created it; native programs must assert account.owner == &expected_program_id, while Anchor's Account<'info, T> wrapper performs this check automatically. Failure to validate ownership can lead to complete auth bypass if an attacker can construct a fake account whose data parses into a struct with elevated privileges.
A class of vulnerabilities where an attacker gains a higher level of authority than legitimately granted — for example, forging admin access, hijacking a program's upgrade authority, or obtaining a PDA signer without possessing the seeds that should gate it. On Solana, common vectors include missing signer checks (an account is treated as an authority without asserting is_signer), misconfigured multisig authority accounts, and upgrade authority mismanagement (leaving a program upgradeable by a hot wallet instead of a governance multisig or burning the upgrade authority entirely). Programs should enforce the principle of least privilege by using immutable upgrade authorities or time-locked governance for high-value programs.
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A vulnerability where a program accepts an account in a privileged role (e.g., admin, authority, payer) without verifying that the account actually signed the transaction, allowing any caller to impersonate that authority by simply passing the target pubkey as an instruction account. In native Solana programs, the check requires asserting account.is_signer == true; in Anchor, the Signer<'info> type enforces this automatically. Exploitation lets an attacker bypass all access control gated on authority equality checks, making it one of the most critical and commonly audited vulnerabilities in Solana programs.
A vulnerability where a program deserializes and trusts account data without first confirming that the account is owned by the expected program, allowing an attacker to substitute a maliciously crafted account owned by a different program whose byte layout happens to satisfy the deserialization. On Solana, every account stores a 32-byte owner field set to the program that created it; native programs must assert account.owner == &expected_program_id, while Anchor's Account<'info, T> wrapper performs this check automatically. Failure to validate ownership can lead to complete auth bypass if an attacker can construct a fake account whose data parses into a struct with elevated privileges.
A vulnerability where a program accepts an arbitrary program account from the caller and invokes it via Cross-Program Invocation (CPI) without verifying it matches a known, trusted program ID, effectively letting an attacker substitute a malicious program that executes under the victim program's authority or manipulates accounts the victim program passes to it. A common pattern is accepting a token_program account without checking it equals spl_token::ID, so the attacker passes a lookalike program that records or drains account data. Prevention requires hard-coding or explicitly checking the program ID before every CPI call.
A vulnerability where a program derives a PDA internally but accepts an externally supplied account as that PDA without re-deriving and comparing the address, allowing an attacker to pass a different PDA (derived from attacker-controlled seeds) that the program will treat as legitimate. Because PDAs are deterministic, the only way to guarantee account identity is to call Pubkey::find_program_address (or equivalent) with the expected seeds inside the program and assert the result equals the supplied key. Anchor's seeds and bump constraints on the Account type automate this re-derivation and equality check.