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concept: fuzzy authentication

Cornelius Kölbel edited this page Oct 27, 2015 · 7 revisions

Fuzzy authentication

fuzzy authentication could take into account some "AI" and evaluate factors like

  • the IP address
  • when was the last time, the user authenticated (he probably will not authenticate every two minutes)
  • what time is it

It could learn authentication behaviour and

  • trigger an alarm if threshold_A is exceeded
  • deny acces if threshold_B is exceeded

simple limits

We could start with simple limits:

  • max_auth_success=1/5m
  • max_auth_fail=10/24h

maximum of 1 successfuly authentication per 5 minutes and a maximum of 10 failed authentications per 24h.

To do this, we could grab the information from the audit-log and search for failed auth events of the user and successful auth events. This would be policies in the scope "authorization" - since these evaluations occur after a user was authenticated (i.e. if the user enters a valid OTP-value, but fails due to max_auth_success, the OTP-value must not be usable anymore).

Again - we could implement this as decorators to modify the authentication behavious.

failcounter

If auth_max_fail is reached, an authentication (even a successful) is not allowed anymore.

If an auth_max_fail policy is defined, maybe the original failcounter should not be used. It might be increased and resetted but it should not be checked.

Thus - if you disable the auth_max_fail policy again - you can go on with the existing failcounter values.