Attack technique where a malicious actor attempts to circumvent Solana's rent mechanism by manipulating account lamport balances to avoid rent-exemption thresholds, or by exploiting programs that don't properly enforce minimum balance requirements when withdrawing lamports from accounts.
Start with the shortest useful explanation before going deeper.
Attack technique where a malicious actor attempts to circumvent Solana's rent mechanism by manipulating account lamport balances to avoid rent-exemption thresholds, or by exploiting programs that don't properly enforce minimum balance requirements when withdrawing lamports from accounts.
Use the quick analogy first so the term is easier to reason about when you meet it in code, docs, or prompts.
Think of it as a building block that connects one definition to the larger Solana system around it.
Place the term inside its Solana layer so the definition is easier to reason about.
Failure modes, audits, attack surfaces, and safe design patterns.
Turn the term from vocabulary into something operational for product and engineering work.
This term unlocks adjacent concepts quickly, so it works best when you treat it as a junction instead of an isolated definition.
Use this compact block when you want to give an agent or assistant grounded context without dumping the entire page.
Rent Evasion (rent-evasion) Category: Security Definition: Attack technique where a malicious actor attempts to circumvent Solana's rent mechanism by manipulating account lamport balances to avoid rent-exemption thresholds, or by exploiting programs that don't properly enforce minimum balance requirements when withdrawing lamports from accounts. Related: Rent, Rent Exemption, Lamport
Use glossary context, relationships, mental models, and builder paths to get structured answers instead of generic chat output.
Optional: paste Anchor, Solana, or Rust code so the Copilot can map primitives back to glossary terms.
The Copilot will answer using the current term, related concepts, mental models, and the surrounding glossary graph.
These branches show which concepts this term touches directly and what sits one layer beyond them.
A fee mechanism that charges accounts for storing data on-chain. Accounts must maintain a minimum lamport balance proportional to their data size (~6.96 SOL per MB) to be rent-exempt. Since 2022, all new accounts must be rent-exempt at creation. Accounts falling below the threshold are removed during rent collection.
The state where an account holds enough lamports to cover two years of rent, making it effectively permanent. The minimum balance is approximately 0.00089088 SOL per byte of data. Since Solana requires all new accounts to be rent-exempt, this is the minimum funding required when creating accounts.
The smallest unit of SOL, named after Leslie Lamport. 1 SOL = 1,000,000,000 (10^9) lamports. All balances and transfers on Solana are denominated in lamports internally. The minimum balance for an account to be rent-exempt is calculated in lamports based on the account's data size.
These are the next concepts worth opening if you want this term to make more sense inside a real Solana workflow.
Glossary entries become useful when they are connected. These links are the shortest path to adjacent ideas.
A fee mechanism that charges accounts for storing data on-chain. Accounts must maintain a minimum lamport balance proportional to their data size (~6.96 SOL per MB) to be rent-exempt. Since 2022, all new accounts must be rent-exempt at creation. Accounts falling below the threshold are removed during rent collection.
The state where an account holds enough lamports to cover two years of rent, making it effectively permanent. The minimum balance is approximately 0.00089088 SOL per byte of data. Since Solana requires all new accounts to be rent-exempt, this is the minimum funding required when creating accounts.
The smallest unit of SOL, named after Leslie Lamport. 1 SOL = 1,000,000,000 (10^9) lamports. All balances and transfers on Solana are denominated in lamports internally. The minimum balance for an account to be rent-exempt is calculated in lamports based on the account's data size.
These entries live beside the current term and help the page feel like part of a larger knowledge graph instead of a dead end.
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.