The Safest Solana Parser Is the One That Refuses Bad Bytes
In case you missed Part 1 of this series:
1. Data bugs are THE bugs
Look through any year’s catalog of SVM exploits and the same patterns keep showing up. An account decodes successfully but belongs to the wrong program. Two account types share a compatible prefix. An “unused” byte turns out to be load-bearing. An enum contains a discriminant nobody bothered to validate.
These aren’t logic bugs. They’re data bugs. The program accepted bytes it should have rejected.
Two of the largest Solana incidents of 2022 fit exactly that pattern. Wormhole minted 120,000 unbacked ETH because a signature check read a spoofed account instead of the Instructions Sysvar. Cashio lost $52 million because a single account in its collateral chain wasn’t properly validated.
Now add an AI to the team.
An agent writes structs quickly and refactors them even faster. It will happily reorder fields, resize a buffer,...
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