Adversarial audit of the auth surface confirmed several exploitable gaps. Every fix
auto-expires and never permanently locks the control plane (bare-IP recovery host and
the clusev:reset-admin CLI stay open).
Login:
- per-IP (20/min) + per-account (30/15min) buckets on top of the existing email+IP 5/min,
so a distributed multi-IP brute-force of the single admin account is capped instead of
scaling linearly with IPs. ip/acct counters decay on their own (a valid login doesn't
reset a flood's budget).
- constant-time: the unknown-email branch now runs one bcrypt against a fixed DUMMY_HASH
(evaluated before the `! $user ||` short-circuit), closing the account-enumeration
timing oracle.
2FA:
- TOTP replay protection — verifyTotp uses verifyKeyNewer with a persisted last-used step
(two_factor_last_used_step migration), so each 30s code is single-use. Passes 0 (never
null) as the old step, since null makes verifyKeyNewer return bare `true` not the step.
- challenge + 2FA-proof reset gain an IP-independent per-account backstop, capping the
distributed TOTP/backup brute-force surface.
Defense-in-depth / DoS:
- global throttle on /livewire/update (180/min per user-id-or-IP) via setUpdateRoute,
keeping 'web' + the persistent EnsureSecurityOnboarded gate intact.
- reauth throttle (5/min per user) on password change/profile; SMTP test-send capped
(3/10min per user) so the panel can't relay spam.
- SshClient gets a short, separate connect timeout (~5s) so a dead/tarpit host can't hold
a worker across several sequential 15s reads (the observed 8.3s /livewire/update DoS).
- profile password policy raised to 12 chars + mixed case + numbers (was 10).
Tests: BruteForceHardeningTest covers TOTP replay, per-email + per-IP login caps,
identical unknown/known rejection, and reauth throttling. Full suite 187 green; Codex
clean; verified in a real browser (login/polls/Livewire updates unaffected by the throttle).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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