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New Azure Active Directory password brute-forcing flaw has no fix (arstechnica.com)
12 points by Deinos on Sept 29, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments


Has no fix? You don't need logging, you just need to keep track of fails and start throttling attempts.


If I'm reading this correctly, the error response back to the client is a problem. The plain text is a generic "invalid username or password", but the error code included reveals too much. One of:

- The user does not exist

- The user exists and the correct username and password were entered, but the account is locked

- The user exists but does not have a password in Azure AD

- The user exists, but the wrong password was entered

- The user exists, but the maximum Pass-through Authentication time was exceeded

This violates a cardinal rule of authentication. A malicious actor can know from the error code if the user they are attempting to break is exists or not (that reduces the search space by quite a lot) and worse, it even tells them when they have a correct username/password combo for a locked account.

Yes, attempts can be throttled, but once the attacker knows a valid username/password, they can just wait.




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