Auditing Solana CPI Chains: How Static Analysis Tools Catch the Vulnerabilities That Manual Review Misses

Cross-Program Invocations (CPIs) on Solana created over $40M in losses in Q1 2026 due to implicit trust relationships that manual auditors miss, such as unvalidated CPI target programs allowing signer hijacking. The article compares three leading static analysis tools for detecting CPI vulnerabilities in Anchor programs, highlighting Soteria's detection capabilities including missing program ID checks and signer forwarding issues. Static analysis catches these critical vulnerabilities in milliseconds where human reviewers scanning thousands of lines of Rust code may overlook them.