Verify login credentials before spending rate-limit budget (closes #150)
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With TRUSTED_PROXIES empty behind the reverse proxy production is
required to run behind, every login POST keyed on the proxy's address
and shared one 5/minute bucket. A stranger sending five POSTs a
minute -- 0.08 requests per second, from anywhere -- kept that bucket
permanently full, and the operator's own correct password was answered
429 indefinitely with no second administrative path.

The login POST no longer has a pre-emptive limiter. The handler
verifies credentials first and spends budget only on a FAILED attempt,
so a correct password is never throttled whatever the counters hold.
Three things follow, and are implemented together because the first is
unsafe without the other two:

- Failures are counted per (client bucket, submitted username), five
  per minute, after which further failures get 429 with a Retry-After.
  A successful login clears the counter, so mistyping and then
  succeeding does not leave the operator throttled.
- Both key sets are capped at 1024 entries. The submitted username is
  attacker-controlled, so past the first cap failures fall back to a
  counter keyed on the client alone, and past both caps a failure is
  answered as throttled without being recorded. Tracked state stays
  under half a megabyte and does not grow with invented usernames.
- Concurrent Argon2id verifications are capped at two, a 128 MB
  ceiling at 64 MB per hash. Every password-hashing endpoint takes a
  slot, including the password-change endpoint, which holds one across
  both its hashes. A request that waits five seconds without a slot is
  answered 503 and no hash runs for it.

An unknown username is verified against a dummy hash instead of
returning early, so a nonexistent account costs the same time as a
real one and the response cannot be used to enumerate usernames.

The password-change limiter is unchanged: RequireAuth runs ahead of
it, so only a request already carrying a valid session reaches its
bucket.

Also adds the missing test for the third bucketKey call site, where
the peer is a trusted proxy but the forwarded chain names no client.
Every existing test of that fallback uses an IPv4 proxy, where
bucketKey is the identity function, so dropping the /64 masking there
left the suite green.

README and the TRUSTED_PROXIES startup warning updated: a shared
bucket now costs precision, not the availability of the admin path.
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-17 22:17:45 +00:00
parent bef9986542
commit fad97445ca
19 changed files with 1612 additions and 129 deletions

View File

@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
package handlers
import (
"context"
"net/http"
"github.com/go-chi/chi"
@@ -42,6 +43,7 @@ func (h *Handlers) HandlePasswordChange() http.HandlerFunc {
}
successMessage, errorMessage, handled := h.applyPasswordChange(
r.Context(),
w,
sessionUsername,
r.FormValue("current_password"),
@@ -66,9 +68,30 @@ func (h *Handlers) HandlePasswordChange() http.HandlerFunc {
// 500 response itself and returns handled=false, signalling the caller
// to stop without re-rendering the page.
func (h *Handlers) applyPasswordChange(
ctx context.Context,
w http.ResponseWriter,
username, currentPassword, newPassword, confirmPassword string,
) (string, string, bool) {
// This endpoint verifies one password and hashes another, at
// 64 MB each, so it takes a slot from the same bound the login
// endpoint uses. The bound is per hash, not per endpoint: leaving
// this path outside it would leave a hole in it. The slot is held
// across both hashes.
release, ok := h.mw.BeginPasswordVerification(ctx)
if !ok {
h.log.Warn("password verification capacity exhausted")
http.Error(
w,
"The server is busy verifying credentials. "+
"Please try again.",
http.StatusServiceUnavailable,
)
return "", "", false
}
defer release()
// Load the user row so we can verify the current password and
// persist the new hash.
var user database.User