As revealed on August 9, the Solana blockchain successfully mitigated a major security threat by implementing a silent patch across its ecosystem. The action was initiated and completed prior to public disclosure, protecting the network from potential exploitation by malicious actors, according to Disclosure Written by Lynn, one of Solana’s leading investigators.
How Solana Secretly Fixed a Vulnerability
The story begins on August 7, 2024, when core members of the Solana Foundation identified a critical security vulnerability and moved to address it. The first message about the impending patch was delivered encrypted to network investigators via private messages from known and verified contacts within the Solana Foundation.
These messages were secured using an encrypted message containing a unique incident ID and timestamp, providing investigators with a verifiable means of trusting the authenticity of the communication. The encrypted message was publicly shared by prominent figures across multiple platforms including Twitter/X, GitHub, and LinkedIn, creating a layer of public acknowledgment without revealing specific details about the vulnerability.
“This question has come up but it’s not really that complicated. Most investigators are active on Discord, many are also active in various Telegram groups, we interact on Twitter/X and we may even personally know Anza or Foundation staff from Breakpoint etc. It’s cumbersome but not that difficult to send direct messages to investigators to pass such messages, especially with a group of 5-8 core people all involved in this communication,” Lin explained.
By August 8, the organization had prepared detailed instructions for investigators. These instructions, sent at 14:00 UTC, included links to download the patch from a GitHub repository maintained by a recognized Anza engineer. The investigators were then instructed on how to verify the downloaded files using the provided SHA sets. They were thus able to manually examine the changes. This ensured that operators would not blindly run undocumented code.
According to Lin, the patch was critical because “the patch itself exposed the vulnerability,” which necessitated swift and conservative action. Within hours of the initial communication, a “super minority” of the network had applied the patch, followed quickly by a “super majority,” achieving the 70% threshold deemed necessary for network security.
Once the critical threshold of nodes being fixed was reached, the Solana Foundation publicly announced the vulnerability and the corrective actions taken. This was done to encourage all remaining operators to update their systems and maintain transparency with the wider community.
“Ultimately, this is the kind of thing that happens in a complex computing environment, and the presence of a vulnerability is not a concern but the response is,” Lin concluded. “The fact that this vulnerability was discovered and safely resolved in a timely manner speaks volumes about the ongoing, often invisible to the public, high-quality engineering efforts of the Anza and Foundation engineers but also the engineers at Jump/Firedancer, Jito, and all the other core contributing teams.”
This approach has sparked debate within the community, particularly regarding the necessity and timing of confidential communications in decentralized networks. A user named @0xemon on X wondered why the initial disclosure wasn’t made sooner.
Lin responded, emphasizing the potential risk of exploitation if the vulnerability is known before a significant portion of the network is secured: “Because the patch itself makes the vulnerability obvious so an attacker can attempt to reverse engineer the vulnerability and take down the network before enough stake is upgraded.”
At the time of publishing this report, SOL price was unaffected by the news and was trading at $154.
Featured image from ONE37pm, chart from TradingView.com
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