[JAMES-3669] Delay on authentication failure

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: master
• Component/s: UsersStore & UsersRepository
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Karsten Otto
• Created: 12/Nov/21 08:02
• Updated: 15/Nov/21 14:04
• Resolved: 15/Nov/21 14:04

Description

For standalone James installations, there should be some basic protection against people/bots abusing James as a password oracle for brute-force/dictionary attacks. This needs to be enforced in a central location, so it affects all of the various protocols supported by James.

This proposal adds an option verifyFailureDelay to usersrepository.xml, which delays the response if someone tries to authenticate with a non-existing user or 
wrong password. There is intentionally no distinction between these two cases, so it also covers username guessing attacks.

Introducing this feature should not affect existing James installations, so the default is 0 delay/disabled.

T-Shirt size S.

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #746