StopGuessing: Using Guessed Passwords to Thwart Online Guessing

Practitioners who seek to defend password-protected resources from online guessing attacks will find a shortage of tooling and techniques to help them. Little research suggests anything beyond blocking or throttling traffic from IP addresses sending suspicious traffic; counting failed authentication requests, or some variant, is often the sole feature used to determine suspicion. In this paper we show that several other features can greatly help distinguishing benign and attack traffic. First, we increase the penalties for clients responsible for fail events involving passwords frequently-guessed by attackers. Second, we reduce the threshold (and thus protect better) for accounts with weak passwords. Third, we detect, and are more forgiving of, login failures caused by users mistyping their passwords. Most importantly, we achieve all of these goals without needing any marker that indicates weak accounts, changing the format in which passwords are stored (i.e. we do not store passwords plaintext or in any recoverable form), or storing any information that might be harmful if leaked. We present an open-source implementation of this system and demonstrate its improvement over simpler blocking strategies in various simulated scenarios.