OWASP Periodic Table of Vulnerabilities - Brute Force (Generic) / Insufficient Anti-automation

Root Cause Summary
Applications do not define or detect when request rates are outside the bounds of normal, acceptable use.

Browser / Standards Solution
None

Perimeter Solution
Perimeter technologies including geocaching/proxy services must support automatic and/or manual "panic button" anti-automation, enforcing progressive CAPTCHA for unvalidated requests, triggering on excessive 5XX responses, or direct signal from application.

Complexity: High Impact: Medium

Generic Framework Solution
Provide configurable per-user/session request rate limits. For authenticated transactions, limits should be configurable on a per-user or per-session basis. Configuration should allow combining multiple limits of the form "# of requests per time period". For example, an administrator should be combine "10 requests per minute" with "500 requests per day" in order to simultaneously apply policies which prevent users from automatic crawling/screen scraping as well as longer-term slow leeching activities.

Complexity: Low Impact: High

Custom Framework Solution
Provide a common configuration functionality available to any feature/function. Configuration settings should allow multiple per-user rate limits as well as global rate limits to prevent denial of service.

Complexity: Low Impact: High

Custom Code Solution
Any feature sensitive to high transaction rates should expose configurable rate limits per user or globally per feature.

Complexity: Low Impact: High

Discussion / Controversy
Generic framework solution requires too much overhead to track request limits. Request rate limiting should be done in perimeter, not framework. Should combine with Denial of Service (Application-Based)? Custom Code solution is the same as Custom Framework Solution; Custom Code solution should be pushed into framework.