The assault on Drift Protocol was unique, differing from traditional hacks that involve bugs or key compromises. Instead, attackers exploited ‘durable nonces,’ a legitimate Solana feature, which allowed them to deceive the security council into pre-approving transactions executed weeks later under unintended conditions.
This method led to at least $270 million being drained in under a minute of execution time, though the setup took over a week. On Solana, transactions normally include a ‘recent blockhash’ that expires within 60 to 90 seconds, ensuring they are timely and not replayed later. However, durable nonces override this by using a fixed nonce stored onchain, which keeps transactions valid indefinitely until submitted.
Designed for legitimate uses like hardware wallets or institutional solutions needing delayed transaction submissions, durable nonces can be exploited if signers’ approvals are manipulated to remain valid over long periods without their knowledge. Drift’s multisig system required two of five council members’ approval for actions, yet the attackers secured these through unauthorized transaction approvals.
The timeline reveals four nonce accounts were created on March 23, with two linked to legitimate council members and two controlled by the attacker. After a Security Council migration on March 27, the attacker adapted quickly, gaining required approvals again by March 30. On April 1, they executed their plan: submitting pre-signed transactions shortly after Drift’s test withdrawal.
In minutes, attackers gained full control of protocol-level permissions, introducing fraudulent withdrawals and draining vaults. Security researcher Vladimir S. tracked stolen assets totaling roughly $270 million across various tokens, with $155.6 million in JPL tokens being the largest category. The funds were initially moved to an inactive primary drainer wallet created eight days earlier via NEAR Protocol intents.
Subsequent transfers involved intermediary wallets funded a day before through Backpack, and finally to Ethereum addresses using Wormhole. Tornado Cash was used for anonymity. ZachXBT noted over $230 million in USDC was transferred through Circle’s CCTP without intervention during a critical six-hour window post-attack.
This attack mirrored previous social engineering exploits like those against Bybit ($1.4 billion), Ronin Bridge ($625 million), and Cetus Protocol ($223 million), emphasizing failures in human oversight rather than code vulnerabilities. Drift’s multisig system failed to align the approval context with execution, leading to significant losses.
The incident impacts all deposits into Drift’s products, but DSOL tokens outside these are unaffected. The protocol has been frozen and compromised wallets removed from control. This marks the third major exploit recently without a code vulnerability, highlighting growing operational security risks in DeFi platforms.
Durable nonces pose a significant threat due to their legitimate purpose and difficulty in defense without altering Solana’s multisig approval mechanics. Drift’s forthcoming postmortem will investigate how two council members unknowingly approved these transactions and explore potential interface changes for better scrutiny of such nonce transactions.