Large-scale online password guessing attacks are widespread and pose a persistant privacy and security threat to users. The common method for mitigating the risk of online cracking is to lock out the user after a fixed number ($K$) of consecutive incorrect login attempts. Selecting the value of $K$ induces a classic security-usability trade-off. When $K$ is too large, a hacker can (quickly) break into a significant fraction of user accounts, but when $K$ is too low, we will start to annoy honest users by locking them out after a few mistakes. Motivated by the observation that honest user mistakes typically look quite different from an online attacker's password guesses, we introduce $\DALock$, a {\em distribution-aware} password lockout mechanism to reduce user annoyance while minimizing user risk. As the name suggests, $\DALock$ is designed to be aware of the frequency and popularity of the password used for login attacks. At the same time, standard throttling mechanisms (e.g., $K$-strikes) are oblivious to the password distribution. In particular, $\DALock$ maintains an extra ``hit count" in addition to ``strike count" for each user, which is based on (estimates of) the cumulative probability of {\em all} login attempts for that particular account. We empirically evaluate $\DALock$ with an extensive battery of simulations using real-world password datasets. In comparison with the traditional $K$-strikes mechanism, {our simulations indicate that} $\DALock$ offers a superior {simulated} security/usability trade-off. For example, in one of our simulations, we are able to reduce the success rate of an attacker to $0.05\%$ (compared to $1\%$ for the $3$-strikes mechanism) whilst simultaneously reducing the unwanted lockout rate for accounts that are not under attack to just $0.08\%$ (compared to $4\%$ for the $3$-strikes mechanism).
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A Measurement Study of Authentication Rate-Limiting Mechanisms of Modern Websites
Text passwords remain a primary means for user authentication on modern computer systems. However, recent studies have shown the promises of guessing user passwords efficiently with auxiliary information of the targeted accounts, such as the users' personal information, previously used passwords, or those used in other systems. Authentication rate-limiting mechanisms, such as account lockout and login throttling, are common methods to defeat online password cracking attacks. But to date, no published studies have investigated how authentication rate-limiting is implemented by popular websites. In this paper, we present a measurement study of such countermeasures against online password cracking. Towards this end, we propose a black-box approach to modeling and validating the websites' implementation of the rate-limiting mechanisms. We applied the tool to examine all 182 websites that we were able to analyze in the Alexa Top 500 websites in the United States. The results are rather surprising: 131 websites (72%) allow frequent, unsuccessful login attempts without account lockout or login throttling (though some of these websites force the adversary to lower the login frequency or constantly change his IP addresses to circumvent the rate-limiting enforcement). The remaining 51 websites are not absolutely secure either: 28 websites may block a legitimate user with correct passwords when the account is locked out, effectively enabling authentication denial-of-service attacks.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1718084
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10119363
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 34th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 89 to 100
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3274694.3274714
