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Plain meaning

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A security mechanism that enforces a mandatory delay between proposing a privileged action (such as a program upgrade, treasury withdrawal, or parameter change) and its execution. Time-locks give stakeholders and users a window to review pending actions, detect malicious proposals, and exit the protocol if needed. On Solana, time-locks are typically implemented through multisig programs like Squads or governance frameworks that queue transactions for a configurable delay period before they become executable.

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Time-Lock (time-lock-security)
Category: Security
Definition: A security mechanism that enforces a mandatory delay between proposing a privileged action (such as a program upgrade, treasury withdrawal, or parameter change) and its execution. Time-locks give stakeholders and users a window to review pending actions, detect malicious proposals, and exit the protocol if needed. On Solana, time-locks are typically implemented through multisig programs like Squads or governance frameworks that queue transactions for a configurable delay period before they become executable.
Related: Squads (Multisig), Multisig, Upgrade Authority

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Branch

Squads (Multisig)

A multisig protocol on Solana (Squads v3/v4) enabling M-of-N approval for transactions. Used to manage program upgrade authorities, treasury wallets, and DAO operations. Squads creates a multisig PDA that acts as the authority; members propose transactions that execute once the threshold is reached. Critical for production program security.

Authority

Open term

Branch

Multisig

An account controlled by multiple parties requiring M-of-N signatures to authorize actions. On Solana, multisig is implemented by programs like Squads rather than at the protocol level. Use cases: program upgrade authority (require 3-of-5 team members), treasury management, and DAO governance execution.

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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Developer Tools

Squads (Multisig)

A multisig protocol on Solana (Squads v3/v4) enabling M-of-N approval for transactions. Used to manage program upgrade authorities, treasury wallets, and DAO operations. Squads creates a multisig PDA that acts as the authority; members propose transactions that execute once the threshold is reached. Critical for production program security.

Open term

Developer Tools

Multisig

An account controlled by multiple parties requiring M-of-N signatures to authorize actions. On Solana, multisig is implemented by programs like Squads rather than at the protocol level. Use cases: program upgrade authority (require 3-of-5 team members), treasury management, and DAO governance execution.

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

Type Cosplay

A vulnerability, also called account confusion, where a program deserializes an account as type A when it actually contains data for type B because both structs happen to share a compatible byte layout at the fields the program checks, enabling an attacker to substitute one account type for another to satisfy access control or arithmetic that assumes a specific type. Anchor prevents this by prepending an 8-byte discriminator (the first 8 bytes of the SHA-256 hash of the fully-qualified type name) to every account during initialization and asserting it on every subsequent access; native programs must implement equivalent discriminator logic manually.

Open term

Related terms

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Developer Toolssquads

Squads (Multisig)

A multisig protocol on Solana (Squads v3/v4) enabling M-of-N approval for transactions. Used to manage program upgrade authorities, treasury wallets, and DAO operations. Squads creates a multisig PDA that acts as the authority; members propose transactions that execute once the threshold is reached. Critical for production program security.

Open term

Developer Toolsmultisig

Multisig

An account controlled by multiple parties requiring M-of-N signatures to authorize actions. On Solana, multisig is implemented by programs like Squads rather than at the protocol level. Use cases: program upgrade authority (require 3-of-5 team members), treasury management, and DAO governance execution.

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