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 leastattacked 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.
Detecting guessing attacks: Herley and Schechter REF provide an algorithm by which a large-volume website can estimate the likelihood that a login is part of a guessing attack, based on the assumption that these malicious logins are a small fraction of total logins.
Distinguishing Attacks from Legitimate Authentication Traffic at Scale
NDSS
Computer Science