Security

Sec3 (formerly Soteria)

Solana security platform providing automated vulnerability detection, real-time program monitoring, and audit services. Their X-ray tool performs static analysis on Solana programs to detect common vulnerability patterns like missing signer checks and integer overflows.

IDsec3AliasSoteria

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Solana security platform providing automated vulnerability detection, real-time program monitoring, and audit services. Their X-ray tool performs static analysis on Solana programs to detect common vulnerability patterns like missing signer checks and integer overflows.

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Sec3 (formerly Soteria) (sec3)
Category: Security
Definition: Solana security platform providing automated vulnerability detection, real-time program monitoring, and audit services. Their X-ray tool performs static analysis on Solana programs to detect common vulnerability patterns like missing signer checks and integer overflows.
Aliases: Soteria
Related: Security Audit, Fuzzing (Trident), Missing Signer Check
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Security Audit

A formal, structured review of a Solana program's source code, architecture, and deployment configuration by experienced security researchers, aimed at identifying vulnerabilities — including but not limited to the OWASP-equivalent Solana Top 10 (missing signer checks, owner checks, arithmetic errors, etc.) — before mainnet deployment. Reputable Solana-focused audit firms include OtterSec, Ackee Blockchain, sec3 (formerly Soteria), Neodyme, Trail of Bits, and Halborn; most audits produce a severity-rated finding report (critical, high, medium, low, informational) that programs are expected to remediate and publish. A single audit is considered minimum due diligence for programs holding significant user funds; continuous auditing and bug bounties on platforms like Immunefi are considered best practice.

Branch

Fuzzing (Trident)

An automated testing technique that generates pseudo-random, mutation-based, or coverage-guided instruction sequences and account inputs to discover crashes, panics, arithmetic errors, and invariant violations in Solana programs without requiring manually written test cases. Trident is the primary Solana-specific fuzzing framework, built on top of the Honggfuzz engine and the Anchor IDL, allowing developers to define instruction sequences and account state fuzzing harnesses that run thousands of iterations per second in a simulated runtime. Fuzzing complements manual audits by exhaustively exploring edge cases in instruction orderings and boundary values that reviewers may miss.

Branch

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.

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Security

Security Audit

A formal, structured review of a Solana program's source code, architecture, and deployment configuration by experienced security researchers, aimed at identifying vulnerabilities — including but not limited to the OWASP-equivalent Solana Top 10 (missing signer checks, owner checks, arithmetic errors, etc.) — before mainnet deployment. Reputable Solana-focused audit firms include OtterSec, Ackee Blockchain, sec3 (formerly Soteria), Neodyme, Trail of Bits, and Halborn; most audits produce a severity-rated finding report (critical, high, medium, low, informational) that programs are expected to remediate and publish. A single audit is considered minimum due diligence for programs holding significant user funds; continuous auditing and bug bounties on platforms like Immunefi are considered best practice.

Security

Fuzzing (Trident)

An automated testing technique that generates pseudo-random, mutation-based, or coverage-guided instruction sequences and account inputs to discover crashes, panics, arithmetic errors, and invariant violations in Solana programs without requiring manually written test cases. Trident is the primary Solana-specific fuzzing framework, built on top of the Honggfuzz engine and the Anchor IDL, allowing developers to define instruction sequences and account state fuzzing harnesses that run thousands of iterations per second in a simulated runtime. Fuzzing complements manual audits by exhaustively exploring edge cases in instruction orderings and boundary values that reviewers may miss.

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.

Security

Sandwich Attack

A form of MEV where an attacker places one transaction immediately before (front-run) and one immediately after (back-run) a victim's large AMM swap: the front-run buys the asset first, driving up the price the victim pays, and the back-run sells the asset immediately after the victim's transaction at the inflated price, extracting the difference as profit. On Solana, sandwich attacks are facilitated through Jito bundles, which allow searchers to atomically guarantee ordering of multiple transactions within a block. Victims can mitigate exposure by setting tight slippage tolerances (e.g., 0.1–0.5%) and using DEX aggregators that route across multiple pools to reduce single-pool price impact.

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Securityaudit

Security Audit

A formal, structured review of a Solana program's source code, architecture, and deployment configuration by experienced security researchers, aimed at identifying vulnerabilities — including but not limited to the OWASP-equivalent Solana Top 10 (missing signer checks, owner checks, arithmetic errors, etc.) — before mainnet deployment. Reputable Solana-focused audit firms include OtterSec, Ackee Blockchain, sec3 (formerly Soteria), Neodyme, Trail of Bits, and Halborn; most audits produce a severity-rated finding report (critical, high, medium, low, informational) that programs are expected to remediate and publish. A single audit is considered minimum due diligence for programs holding significant user funds; continuous auditing and bug bounties on platforms like Immunefi are considered best practice.

Securityfuzzing

Fuzzing (Trident)

An automated testing technique that generates pseudo-random, mutation-based, or coverage-guided instruction sequences and account inputs to discover crashes, panics, arithmetic errors, and invariant violations in Solana programs without requiring manually written test cases. Trident is the primary Solana-specific fuzzing framework, built on top of the Honggfuzz engine and the Anchor IDL, allowing developers to define instruction sequences and account state fuzzing harnesses that run thousands of iterations per second in a simulated runtime. Fuzzing complements manual audits by exhaustively exploring edge cases in instruction orderings and boundary values that reviewers may miss.

Securitymissing-signer-check

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.