CWE-645

Base Abstraction Level
Pillar — Highest-level weakness category
Class — Abstract, language-independent
Base — Specific enough to detect
Variant — Tied to specific technology
Compound — Requires multiple weaknesses Incomplete MITRE CWE Status
Stable — Fully reviewed and complete
Draft — Under development, may change
Incomplete — Partially defined by MITRE
Deprecated — No longer recommended
Obsolete — Replaced by another CWE Exploit: High
Overly Restrictive Account Lockout Mechanism

Description

The product contains an account lockout protection mechanism, but the mechanism is too restrictive and can be triggered too easily, which allows attackers to deny service to legitimate users by causing their accounts to be locked out.

Account lockout is a security feature often present in applications as a countermeasure to the brute force attack on the password based authentication mechanism of the system. After a certain number of failed login attempts, the users' account may be disabled for a certain period of time or until it is unlocked by an administrator. Other security events may also possibly trigger account lockout. However, an attacker may use this very security feature to deny service to legitimate system users. It is therefore important to ensure that the account lockout security mechanism is not overly restrictive.

Consequences

Availability — DoS: Resource Consumption (Other)

Users could be locked out of accounts.

Mitigations

Phase: Architecture and Design

Implement more intelligent password throttling mechanisms such as those which take IP address into account, in addition to the login name.

Phase: Architecture and Design

Implement a lockout timeout that grows as the number of incorrect login attempts goes up, eventually resulting in a complete lockout.

Phase: Architecture and Design

Consider alternatives to account lockout that would still be effective against password brute force attacks, such as presenting the user machine with a puzzle to solve (makes it do some computation).