1. Reporting security problems
2. Security Bug Bounties
3. Incident Response Process

DO NOT CREATE A GITHUB ISSUE to report a security problem.

Instead please use this Report a Vulnerability link. Provide a helpful title, detailed description of the vulnerability and an exploit proof-of-concept. Speculative submissions without proof-of-concept will be closed with no further consideration.

If you haven't done so already, please enable two-factor auth in your GitHub account.

Expect a response as fast as possible in the advisory, typically within 72 hours.

--

If you do not receive a response in the advisory, send an email to [email protected] with the full URL of the advisory you have created. DO NOT include attachments or provide detail sufficient for exploitation regarding the security issue in this email. Only provide such details in the advisory.

If you do not receive a response from [email protected] please followup with the team directly. You can do this in the #core-technology channel of the Solana Tech discord server, by pinging the Solana Labs role in the channel and referencing the fact that you submitted a security problem.

In case an incident is discovered or reported, the following process will be followed to contain, respond and remediate:

In response a newly reported security problem, a member of the solana-labs/admins group will accept the report to turn it into a draft advisory. The solana-labs/security-incident-response group should be added to the draft security advisory, and create a private fork of the repository (grey button towards the bottom of the page) if necessary.

If the advisory is the result of an audit finding, follow the same process as above but add the auditor's github user(s) and begin the title with "[Audit]".

If the report is out of scope, a member of the solana-labs/admins group will comment as such and then close the report.

Within the draft security advisory, discuss and determine the severity of the issue. If necessary, members of the solana-labs/security-incident-response group may add other github users to the advisory to assist. If it is determined that this not a critical network issue then the advisory should be closed and if more follow-up is required a normal Solana public github issue should be created.

For the affected branches, typically all three (edge, beta and stable), prepare a fix for the issue and push them to the corresponding branch in the private repository associated with the draft security advisory. There is no CI available in the private repository so you must build from source and manually verify fixes. Code review from the reporter is ideal, as well as from multiple members of the core development team.

Once an ETA is available for the fix, a member of the solana-labs/security-incident-response group should notify the validators so they can prepare for an update using the "Solana Red Alert" notification system. The teams are all over the world and it's critical to provide actionable information at the right time. Don't be the person that wakes everybody up at 2am when a fix won't be available for hours.

Once the fix is accepted, a member of the solana-labs/security-incident-response group should prepare a single patch file for each affected branch. The commit title for the patch should only contain the advisory id, and not disclose any further details about the incident. Copy the patches to https://release.solana.com/ under a subdirectory named after the advisory id (example: https://release.solana.com/GHSA-hx59-f5g4-jghh/v1.4.patch). Contact a member of the solana-labs/admins group if you require access to release.solana.com Using the "Solana Red Alert" channel: a) Notify validators that there's an issue and a patch will be provided in X minutes b) If X minutes expires and there's no patch, notify of the delay and provide a new ETA c) Provide links to patches of https://release.solana.com/ for each affected branch Validators can be expected to build the patch from source against the latest release for the affected branch. Since the software version will not change after the patch is applied, request that each validator notify in the existing channel once they've updated. Manually monitor the roll out until a sufficient amount of stake has updated - typically at least 33.3% or 66.6% depending on the issue.

Once the fix has been deployed to the security group validators, the patches from the security advisory may be merged into the main source repository. A new official release for each affected branch should be shipped and all validators requested to upgrade as quickly as possible.

If this issue is eligible for a bounty, prefix the title of the security advisory with one of the following, depending on the severity:

• [Bounty Category: Critical: Loss of Funds]
• [Bounty Category: Critical: Consensus / Safety Violations]
• [Bounty Category: Critical: Liveness / Loss of Availability]
• [Bounty Category: Critical: DoS Attacks]
• [Bounty Category: Supply Chain Attacks]
• [Bounty Category: RPC]

Confirm with the reporter that they agree with the severity assessment, and discuss as required to reach a conclusion.

We currently do not use the Github workflow to publish security advisories. Once the issue and fix have been disclosed, and a bounty category is assessed if appropriate, the GitHub security advisory is no longer needed and can be closed.

The Solana Foundation offer bounties for critical Solana security issues. Please see below for more details. Either a demonstration or a valid bug report is all that's necessary to submit a bug bounty. A patch to fix the issue isn't required.

$2,000,000 USD in locked SOL tokens (locked for 12 months)

• Theft of funds without users signature from any account
• Theft of funds without users interaction in system, token, stake, vote programs
• Theft of funds that requires users signature - creating a vote program that drains the delegated stakes.

$1,000,000 USD in locked SOL tokens (locked for 12 months)

• Consensus safety violation
• Tricking a validator to accept an optimistic confirmation or rooted slot without a double vote, etc.

$400,000 USD in locked SOL tokens (locked for 12 months)

• Whereby consensus halts and requires human intervention
• Eclipse attacks,
• Remote attacks that partition the network,

$100,000 USD in locked SOL tokens (locked for 12 months)

• Remote resource exaustion via Non-RPC protocols

$100,000 USD in locked SOL tokens (locked for 12 months)

• Non-social attacks against source code change management, automated testing, release build, release publication and release hosting infrastructure of the monorepo.

$5,000 USD in locked SOL tokens (locked for 12 months)

• RPC attacks

The following components are out of scope for the bounty program

• Metrics: /metrics in the monorepo as well as https://metrics.solana.com
• Any encrypted credentials, auth tokens, etc. checked into the repo
• Bugs in dependencies. Please take them upstream!
• Attacks that require social engineering
• Any undeveloped automated tooling (scanners, etc) results. (OK with developed PoC)
• Any asset whose source code does not exist in this repository (including, but not limited to, any and all web properties not explicitly listed on this page)

• Submissions MUST include an exploit proof-of-concept to be considered eligible
• The participant submitting the bug report shall follow the process outlined within this document
• Valid exploits can be eligible even if they are not successfully executed on a public cluster
• Multiple submissions for the same class of exploit are still eligible for compensation, though may be compensated at a lower rate, however these will be assessed on a case-by-case basis
• Participants must complete KYC and sign the participation agreement here when the registrations are open https://solana.foundation/kyc. Security exploits will still be assessed and open for submission at all times. This needs only be done prior to distribution of tokens.

Compensation for duplicative reports will be split among reporters with first to report taking priority using the following equation

R: total reports
ri: report priority
bi: bounty share

bi = 2 ^ (R - ri) / ((2^R) - 1)

• Bounties are currently awarded on a rolling/weekly basis and paid out within 30 days upon receipt of an invoice.
• The SOL/USD conversion rate used for payments is the market price of SOL (denominated in USD) at the end of the day the invoice is submitted by the researcher.
• The reference for this price is the Closing Price given by Coingecko.com on that date given here: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/solana/historical_data/usd#panel
• Bug bounties that are paid out in SOL are paid to stake accounts with a lockup expiring 12 months from the date of delivery of SOL.