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

@@ -96,11 +96,14 @@ func (s *Server) setupPageRoutes() {
r.Use(s.mw.CSRF())
r.Use(s.mw.NoCache())
r.Group(func(r chi.Router) {
r.Use(s.mw.LoginRateLimit())
r.Get("/login", s.h.HandleLoginPage())
r.Post("/login", s.h.HandleLoginSubmit())
})
// The login POST carries no pre-emptive rate limiter. Behind
// the reverse proxy production requires, with TRUSTED_PROXIES
// unset, every client shares one bucket, so a limiter spent
// on arrival lets any stranger deny the operator the only
// administrative path. The handler verifies credentials first
// and charges only failures; see Handlers.authenticateUser.
r.Get("/login", s.h.HandleLoginPage())
r.Post("/login", s.h.HandleLoginSubmit())
r.Post("/logout", s.h.HandleLogout())
})