Throttling Authentication Attempts - Failure

CAS provides a facility for limiting failed login attempts to support password guessing and related abuse scenarios. A couple strategies are provided for tracking failed attempts:

  1. Source IP - Limit successive failed logins against any username from the same IP address.
  2. Source IP and username - Limit successive failed logins against a particular user from the same IP address.

All login throttling components that ship with CAS limit successive failed login attempts that exceed a threshold rate, which is a time in seconds between two failures. The following properties are provided to define the failure rate.

  • threshold - Number of failed login attempts.
  • rangeSeconds - Period of time in seconds.

A failure rate of more than 1 per 3 seconds is indicative of an automated authentication attempt, which is a reasonable basis for throttling policy. Regardless of policy care should be taken to weigh security against access; overly restrictive policies may prevent legitimate authentication attempts.

:information_source: Threshold Rate

The failure threshold rate is calculated as: threshold / rangeSeconds. For instance, the failure rate for the above scenario would be 0.333333. An authentication attempt may be considered throttled if the request submission rate (calculated as the difference between the current date and the last submission date) exceeds the failure threshold rate.

Enable the following module in your configuration overlay:



1
2
3
4
5



<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apereo.cas</groupId>
    <artifactId>cas-server-support-throttle</artifactId>
    <version>${cas.version}</version>
</dependency>





1



implementation "org.apereo.cas:cas-server-support-throttle:${project.'cas.version'}"





1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9



dependencyManagement {
    imports {
        mavenBom "org.apereo.cas:cas-server-support-bom:${project.'cas.version'}"
    }
}

dependencies {
    implementation "org.apereo.cas:cas-server-support-throttle"
}





1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10



dependencies {
    /*
        The following platform references should be included automatically and are listed here for reference only.

        implementation enforcedPlatform("org.apereo.cas:cas-server-support-bom:${project.'cas.version'}")
        implementation platform(org.springframework.boot.gradle.plugin.SpringBootPlugin.BOM_COORDINATES)
        
    */
    implementation "org.apereo.cas:cas-server-support-throttle"
}

Configuration

The following settings and properties are available from the CAS configuration catalog:

The configuration settings listed below are tagged as Required in the CAS configuration metadata. This flag indicates that the presence of the setting may be needed to activate or affect the behavior of the CAS feature and generally should be reviewed, possibly owned and adjusted. If the setting is assigned a default value, you do not need to strictly put the setting in your copy of the configuration, but should review it nonetheless to make sure it matches your deployment expectations.

The configuration settings listed below are tagged as Optional in the CAS configuration metadata. This flag indicates that the presence of the setting is not immediately necessary in the end-user CAS configuration, because a default value is assigned or the activation of the feature is not conditionally controlled by the setting value. In other words, you should only include this field in your configuration if you need to modify the default value or if you need to turn on the feature controlled by the setting.

CAS takes advantage of Apache Groovy in forms of either embedded or external scripts that allow one to, by default, dynamically build constructs, attributes, access strategies and a lot more. To activate the functionality described here, you may need to prepare CAS to support and integrate with Apache Groovy.

Please review this guide to configure your build.

Configuration Metadata

The collection of configuration properties listed in this section are automatically generated from the CAS source and components that contain the actual field definitions, types, descriptions, modules, etc. This metadata may not always be 100% accurate, or could be lacking details and sufficient explanations.

Be Selective

This section is meant as a guide only. Do NOT copy/paste the entire collection of settings into your CAS configuration; rather pick only the properties that you need. Do NOT enable settings unless you are certain of their purpose and do NOT copy settings into your configuration only to keep them as reference. All these ideas lead to upgrade headaches, maintenance nightmares and premature aging.

YAGNI

Note that for nearly ALL use cases, declaring and configuring properties listed here is sufficient. You should NOT have to explicitly massage a CAS XML/Java/etc configuration file to design an authentication handler, create attribute release policies, etc. CAS at runtime will auto-configure all required changes for you. If you are unsure about the meaning of a given CAS setting, do NOT turn it on without hesitation. Review the codebase or better yet, ask questions to clarify the intended behavior.

Naming Convention

Property names can be specified in very relaxed terms. For instance cas.someProperty, cas.some-property, cas.some_property are all valid names. While all forms are accepted by CAS, there are certain components (in CAS and other frameworks used) whose activation at runtime is conditional on a property value, where this property is required to have been specified in CAS configuration using kebab case. This is both true for properties that are owned by CAS as well as those that might be presented to the system via an external library or framework such as Spring Boot, etc.

:information_source: Note

When possible, properties should be stored in lower-case kebab format, such as cas.property-name=value. The only possible exception to this rule is when naming actuator endpoints; The name of the actuator endpoints (i.e. ssoSessions) MUST remain in camelCase mode.

Settings and properties that are controlled by the CAS platform directly always begin with the prefix cas. All other settings are controlled and provided to CAS via other underlying frameworks and may have their own schemas and syntax. BE CAREFUL with the distinction. Unrecognized properties are rejected by CAS and/or frameworks upon which CAS depends. This means if you somehow misspell a property definition or fail to adhere to the dot-notation syntax and such, your setting is entirely refused by CAS and likely the feature it controls will never be activated in the way you intend.

Validation

Configuration properties are automatically validated on CAS startup to report issues with configuration binding, specially if defined CAS settings cannot be recognized or validated by the configuration schema. Additional validation processes are also handled via Configuration Metadata and property migrations applied automatically on startup by Spring Boot and family.

Indexed Settings

CAS settings able to accept multiple values are typically documented with an index, such as cas.some.setting[0]=value. The index [0] is meant to be incremented by the adopter to allow for distinct multiple configuration blocks.

Actuator Endpoints

The following endpoints are provided by CAS:

 Clean or release all throttled interceptors or remove a throttled authentication record by key.

 Get throttled authentication records.


Throttling Strategies

The following throttling strategies are offered by CAS.

Storage Description
IP Address Uses a memory map to prevent successive failed login attempts from the same IP address.
IP Address and Username Uses a memory map to prevent successive failed login attempts for a username from the same IP address.
JDBC See this guide.
MongoDb See this guide.
Redis See this guide.
Hazelcast See this guide.

High Availability

All of the throttling components are suitable for a CAS deployment that satisfies the recommended HA architecture. In particular deployments with multiple CAS nodes behind a load balancer configured with session affinity can use either in-memory or inspektr components. It is instructive to discuss the rationale. Since load balancer session affinity is determined by source IP address, which is the same criterion by which throttle policy is applied, an attacker from a fixed location should be bound to the same CAS server node for successive authentication attempts. A distributed attack, on the other hand, where successive request would be routed indeterminately, would cause haphazard tracking for in-memory CAS components since attempts would be split across N systems. However, since the source varies, accurate accounting would be pointless since the throttling components themselves assume a constant source IP for tracking purposes. The login throttling components are not sufficient for detecting or preventing a distributed password brute force attack.