CWE-645: Overly Restrictive Account Lockout Mechanism

CWE-645: Overly Restrictive Account Lockout Mechanism is a Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) entry maintained by MITRE. The product contains an account lockout protection mechanism, but the mechanism is too restrictive and can be triggered too easily, which allows attackers to deny service to legitimate users by causing their accounts to be locked out. Account lockout is a security feature often present in applications as a countermeasure to the brute force attack on the password based authentication mechanism of the system. After a certain number of failed login attempts, the users' account may be disabled for a certain period of time or until it is unlocked by an administrator. Other security events may also possibly trigger account lockout. However, an attacker may use this very security feature to deny service to legitimate system users. It is therefore important to ensure that the account lockout security mechanism is not overly restrictive.

If exploited, CWE-645 (Overly Restrictive Account Lockout Mechanism) it can compromise Availability, leading to outcomes such as DoS: Resource Consumption (Other).

Recommended mitigations for CWE-645 include: Implement more intelligent password throttling mechanisms such as those which take IP address into account, in addition to the login name. Implement a lockout timeout that grows as the number of incorrect login attempts goes up, eventually resulting in a complete lockout. Consider alternatives to account lockout that would still be effective against password brute force attacks, such as presenting the user machine with a puzzle to solve (makes it do some computation).

CWE-645 commonly affects Not Language-Specific. Note that weaknesses are often language-agnostic patterns, so secure coding practices apply broadly.

A CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) like CWE-645 describes a category of software weakness — the underlying flaw type. A CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) identifies a specific, real-world vulnerability in a particular product. In short, a CWE is the kind of mistake, and a CVE is an instance of that mistake being found in software.