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Re:Pwned Passwords in Practice: Real World Examples of Block... by snowwolf on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @02:04PM (#17181554)
Perhaps an example will help.

Lets say you have IP throttling/rate limiting. And you have it set to an extremely conservative limit - 1 sign in attempt every hour. This is great for the brute force threat - 24 passwords a day can be attempted by 1 IP. Infeasible for any brute forcing.

But now lets say the attacker has access to a botnet with 6 million unique IP addresses (not theoretical - see my comment above).

Now for each of those 6 million IPs they can try 24 passwords a day - i.e. 144 million attempts a day without ever triggering the throttle.

Bear in mind also that they aren't just trying random passwords for an account - they have a compiled/combined breach list of known account/password combinations from other breaches. So they can attempt 144 million known combinations a day. Without hitting any throttles (this is what the parent above means by "end up succeding").

What percentage of your users reuse passwords and have been exposed to at least one breach? I would suggest it's quite a high value. How long do you think it will take a credential stuffing attack to identify those accounts on your site when they can try 100's of millions of combinations a day?

This is the threat vector.

Re:Pwned Passwords in Practice: Real World Examples of Block... by jessaustin on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @08:56PM (#17184074)
ISTM the next step would be to rate limit for a given account without regard to IP. Sure that's a potential DOS, but we can wait until that's actually a problem before worrying about it.
Re:Pwned Passwords in Practice: Real World Examples of Block... by snowwolf on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @02:44AM (#17185604)
They aren’t trying the same account multiple times. Well they may be conincidentally (if the user uses a unique password per site and has been breached from multiple sites so appears in the breach list multiple times with different passwords) but not that frequently. What they are looking for is the intersection of users who reuse passwords and have been exposed by a breach and those users who have created an account on your site reusing the same password. Which is perhaps not surprisingly a relatively large percentage of your users.
Re:Pwned Passwords in Practice: Real World Examples of Block... by snowwrestler on Wednesday May 30, 2018 @01:15AM (#17185245)
From a wrestler to a wolf: thank you. Very helpful.
Re:Pwned Passwords in Practice: Real World Examples of Block... by jsmeaton on Tuesday May 29, 2018 @05:34PM (#17183087)
Thank you, this covered what I was trying to say.