An Empirical Analysis of Incorrect Account Remediation in the Case of Broken Authentication

One of the most critical vulnerabilities in authentication, commonly referred to as “broken authentication,” poses a harmful threat, leading to the compromise of user credentials and the unauthorized hijacking of sessions. Addressing these security breaches is imperative, necessitating effective remediation mechanisms. Our primary objective is to assess and enhance the security posture of remediation mechanisms by addressing the vulnerabilities associated with broken authentication. Our investigation reveals deficiencies in the implementation of the three prevailing remediation mechanisms across popular Service Providers (SPs), rendering manual remediation attempts futile. We demonstrate our claim by measuring post-compromise security preparedness across over 350 popular websites and applications. During the measurement, SPs were divided into three groups to compare the correctness of the remediation mechanisms across groups. Based on the measurement and evaluation results, we analyzed the root cause of such incorrectness and discussed possible mitigations and practical recommendations to solve the remedial problems. The scope of this study ranges from compromise to the immediate consequences of countermeasures. Hence, discussions of the causes of broken authentication and descriptions of attacks for breaking authentication are beyond the scope of this study. Detailed case studies of four popular SPs are included to discuss their unique reactive prevention behaviors. Observations and their meaningful results challenge us to render remediation mechanisms opaque and difficult to audit, which contributes to underestimating the security threats of ineffective revocations.