Distinguishing Attacks from Legitimate Authentication Traffic at Scale

Abstract

Online guessing attacks against password servers can be hard to address. Approaches that throttle or block repeated guesses on an account (e.g., three strikes type lockout rules) can be effective against depth-first attacks, but are of little help against breadth-first attacks that spread guesses very widely. At large providers with tens, or hundreds, of millions of accounts breadth-first attacks offer a way to send millions or even billions of guesses without ever triggering the depth-first defenses. The absence of labels and non-stationarity of attack traffic make it challenging to apply machine learning techniques. We show how to accurately estimate the odds that an observation x indicates that a request is malicious. Our main assumptions are that successful malicious logins are a small fraction of the total, and that the distribution of x in the legitimate traffic is stationary, or very-slowly varying. From these we show how we can estimate the ratio of bad-to-good traffic among any set of requests; how we can then identify subsets of the request data that contain least (or even no) attack traffic; how these least-attacked subsets allow us to estimate the distribution of values of x over the legitimate data, and hence calculate the odds ratio. A sensitivity analysis shows that even when we fail to identify a subset with little attack traffic our odds ratio estimates are very robust.