Skip to content

Add some content on adaptive auth #1657

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Open
wants to merge 4 commits into
base: master
Choose a base branch
from
Open

Conversation

tghosth
Copy link
Contributor

@tghosth tghosth commented May 5, 2025

This originally came from a @jmanico comment here: OWASP/ASVS#3071 (comment)

You're A Rockstar

Thank you for submitting a Pull Request (PR) to the Cheat Sheet Series.

🚩 If your PR is related to grammar/typo mistakes, please double-check the file for other mistakes in order to fix all the issues in the current cheat sheet.

Please make sure that for your contribution:

  • In case of a new Cheat Sheet, you have used the Cheat Sheet template.
  • All the markdown files do not raise any validation policy violation, see the policy.
  • All the markdown files follow these format rules.
  • All your assets are stored in the assets folder.
  • All the images used are in the PNG format.
  • Any references to websites have been formatted as [TEXT](URL)
  • You verified/tested the effectiveness of your contribution (e.g., the defensive code proposed is really an effective remediation? Please verify it works!).
  • The CI build of your PR pass, see the build status here.

This originally came from a @jmanico comment here: OWASP/ASVS#3071 (comment)
mackowski
mackowski previously approved these changes May 5, 2025
Copy link
Collaborator

@mackowski mackowski left a comment

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Looks good! Do we want to link back to ASVS here?

@tghosth
Copy link
Contributor Author

tghosth commented May 5, 2025

Looks good! Do we want to link back to ASVS here?

@jmanico what do you think?

@jmanico
Copy link
Member

jmanico commented May 5, 2025 via email

kwwall
kwwall previously approved these changes May 6, 2025
Copy link
Collaborator

@kwwall kwwall left a comment

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

I think this looks like a great start. I will toss out a few additional things that you may wish to consider mentioning:

  1. Whatever adaptive authN that an application chooses, it should be in line with any corporate policies and especially any regulatory policy.
  2. Sometimes, rather than starting out with MFA (which can be tedious) you might allow low risk access with just things that identify the device (e.g., a specific mobile device fingerprint, a persist cookie and browser fingerprint, etc. from the previous IP address). An example might be to allow someone to trigger something to see their current bank balance, but not the account # or anything else. If they need to see transactions, then you make them do some base level authN and if they want to do any money movement, you require MFA.
  3. Some of the checks act as red flags. For instance, if you do IP-based geolocation checks every T minutes and find that during those 2 snapshots there are further apart than reasonable, you might send the user an email about the suspicious activity and log out both instances, or you instantly force both sessions to re-authenticate with some stronger adaptive authentication.
  4. In lieu of making users re-authenticate, sometimes they will instead require you to answer the KYC (Know Your Customer) type of questions. (Personally, I'd prefer to just re-login, but that's just me.)

@jmanico
Copy link
Member

jmanico commented May 6, 2025

This is outstanding feedback Kevin 🤙🏽

@tghosth tghosth dismissed stale reviews from kwwall and mackowski via 5e77ea7 May 6, 2025 08:13
@tghosth
Copy link
Contributor Author

tghosth commented May 6, 2025

I made some changes based on that feedback, I am a little wary of knowledge based questions as I know we prefer to avoid them.

kwwall
kwwall previously approved these changes May 6, 2025
Copy link
Collaborator

@kwwall kwwall left a comment

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Found 1 minor typo, otherwise, LGTM. I understand your reluctance of KYC (Know Your Customer), I've never much cared for it either, but it is widely used in financial circles. And according to this blog post, there may even be a regulatory compliance basis to it as well.

@tghosth
Copy link
Contributor Author

tghosth commented May 6, 2025

Ok, please can this be merged then?

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

5 participants