Glossary OS

Plain meaning

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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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Privilege Escalation (privilege-escalation)
Category: Security
Definition: 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.
Related: Authority, Upgrade Authority

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Branch

Authority

A pubkey with administrative privileges over a resource—such as the mint authority (can mint tokens), freeze authority (can freeze accounts), upgrade authority (can upgrade a program), or the signer authorized to perform operations on a PDA-controlled account. Authority is a convention, not a runtime concept.

Owner (Account)Signer

Open term

Branch

Upgrade Authority

The pubkey authorized to upgrade a program's bytecode via the Upgradeable BPF Loader. Only the upgrade authority can deploy new bytecode to the program data account. Setting the upgrade authority to None makes the program immutable. Multisig (e.g., Squads) is commonly used to manage upgrade authority for production programs.

Upgradeable BPF Loader Program

Open term

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Programming Model

Authority

A pubkey with administrative privileges over a resource—such as the mint authority (can mint tokens), freeze authority (can freeze accounts), upgrade authority (can upgrade a program), or the signer authorized to perform operations on a PDA-controlled account. Authority is a convention, not a runtime concept.

Open term

Programming Model

Upgrade Authority

The pubkey authorized to upgrade a program's bytecode via the Upgradeable BPF Loader. Only the upgrade authority can deploy new bytecode to the program data account. Setting the upgrade authority to None makes the program immutable. Multisig (e.g., Squads) is commonly used to manage upgrade authority for production programs.

Open term

Security

Property-Based Testing

A testing methodology where developers define properties (invariants) that must hold true for all valid inputs, and a test framework generates random inputs to attempt to falsify those properties. Unlike unit tests that check specific examples, property-based testing explores the input space stochastically. For Solana programs, properties might include 'total token supply never changes during transfers' or 'only the authority can modify the config account.' Tools like Trident and proptest support this approach.

Open term

Security

Precision Loss / Rounding Errors

A class of numerical vulnerability where integer division discards fractional remainders, causing systematic under-accounting of fees, interest, or token amounts that an attacker can exploit through repeated small transactions to drain protocol funds or receive more than entitled. Because Solana programs use integer arithmetic exclusively (no native floating point in on-chain code), division operations like amount / price always truncate toward zero, and protocols must decide whether to round in favor of the protocol (ceiling division for fees collected, floor division for tokens distributed) using formulas such as (numerator + denominator - 1) / denominator. Precision errors can also compound across fixed-point representations, so high-precision intermediate scaling (e.g., multiplying by 10^9 before dividing) is a common mitigation.

Open term

Related terms

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Programming Modelauthority

Authority

A pubkey with administrative privileges over a resource—such as the mint authority (can mint tokens), freeze authority (can freeze accounts), upgrade authority (can upgrade a program), or the signer authorized to perform operations on a PDA-controlled account. Authority is a convention, not a runtime concept.

Open term

Programming Modelupgrade-authority

Upgrade Authority

The pubkey authorized to upgrade a program's bytecode via the Upgradeable BPF Loader. Only the upgrade authority can deploy new bytecode to the program data account. Setting the upgrade authority to None makes the program immutable. Multisig (e.g., Squads) is commonly used to manage upgrade authority for production programs.

Open term

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Security

Missing Signer Check

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.

Open term

Security

Missing Owner Check

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.

Open term

Security

Arbitrary CPI

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.

Open term

Security

PDA Substitution Attack

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.

Open term