Why authentication fails in real systems
Authentication sits near the top of OWASP’s risk list because failures here immediately grant attackers direct access to data and actions. Common problems include weak password storage, no MFA, guessable reset flows, and missing protections like rate limiting and IP/device anomaly checks.
The goal is not just “log the user in” but to make impersonation and unauthorized access extremely expensive for attackers while keeping friction acceptable for legitimate users. That balance comes from a combination of strong credentials, multiple factors, careful state handling, and resilient recovery flows.
Designing strong authentication flows
A modern authentication flow should:
- Reliably identify a user with credentials that are hard to guess or brute-force.
- Resist credential stuffing, password spraying, and replay attacks.
- Support change over time (password change, factor change) without creating new weaknesses.
Key practices from the OWASP Authentication Cheat Sheet include: using secure transport (TLS), avoiding exposure of usernames/passwords in URLs or logs, and ensuring login, logout, and session handling are tightly coupled.
For Niyava-style API backends, this typically means:
- Centralizing authentication in an auth service or identity provider (IdP).
- Using short-lived tokens (e.g., JWTs or opaque tokens) with server-side verification.
- Treating all auth operations as high-risk endpoints with extra logging and monitoring.
Password policies that actually improve security
Password policy design has evolved. OWASP and modern guidance now prioritize length and resistance to guessing over pure complexity rules like “must contain special characters”.
Effective policy elements:
- Minimum length: at least 8 characters as a baseline, with 12+ recommended for high-value accounts.
- No arbitrary maximums below ~64 characters to allow passphrases and password managers.
- Allow passphrases and discourage simple, common passwords by screening against known-breached password lists.
- Avoid frequent forced rotation unless there is evidence of compromise; forced changes often drive users toward weaker patterns.
Policies need to be enforced consistently across registration, password change, and reset flows, and user interfaces should provide real-time strength feedback (e.g., using a library like zxcvbn).
Storing passwords safely
No system should ever store plaintext or reversibly encrypted user passwords. Instead, passwords must be transformed with slow, salted, adaptive hashing algorithms so that even if a password database is leaked, cracking it is expensive.
OWASP’s Password Storage Cheat Sheet recommends:
- Use algorithms designed for passwords: Argon2id, bcrypt, scrypt, or PBKDF2 with a high iteration count.
- Generate a unique, random salt for each password (at least 16 bytes) and store it alongside the hash.
- Consider a pepper—a separate secret applied uniformly to all passwords and stored in a secure vault or HSM, not in the main database.
- Tune work factors (cost/iterations/memory) so hashing is slow enough to deter brute-force attacks but still acceptable for legitimate logins.
A typical storage scheme:
- On registration or change:
- Generate salt.
- Compute
hash = bcrypt(password + pepper, salt)(conceptually). - Store
{salt, hash, algorithm, parameters}.
- On login:
This approach dramatically reduces the value of a compromised credentials database to an attacker.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA) and step-up security
Multi-factor authentication adds a second (or third) proof of identity so that stolen or guessed passwords alone are not enough. Data from large platforms shows that MFA reduces the likelihood of account compromise by orders of magnitude.
Best practices from OWASP MFA guidance:
- Require some form of MFA for administrative and high-privilege accounts at a minimum.
- Offer TOTP (time-based one-time passwords via authenticator apps) or hardware keys as preferred factors over SMS, which is vulnerable to SIM swapping.
- Support multiple factors per user (e.g., TOTP + backup codes) to avoid lockouts if a single factor is lost.
- Require re-authentication with an enrolled factor before sensitive actions like password change, factor replacement, or disabling MFA.
For Niyava’s clients, common patterns include:
- Enforcing MFA on internal admin portals and dashboards by default.
- Using adaptive or risk-based MFA that triggers step-up verification on new devices, unusual locations, or suspicious behavior.
Protecting login and reset flows from abuse
Attackers often target the login and password reset flows with automation and credential stuffing. So even with strong passwords and MFA, the flows themselves need resilience.
- Rate limiting and lockout
- Limit login attempts per username and per IP, with careful balance to avoid easy lockout attacks.
- Use progressive delays or CAPTCHAs after multiple failures.
- Monitoring and anomaly detection
- Robust password reset
- Use single-use, time-limited tokens delivered via secure channels (usually email).
- Never reveal whether a given account exists with different messaging; respond with uniform “If this email exists, we’ve sent instructions.”
- Invalidate active sessions after a successful password reset and notify users via out-of-band channels (e.g., email) of the change.
These practices significantly reduce the risk of brute-force, enumeration, and token replay attacks on login and reset endpoints.
Practical checklist for Niyava teams
To make this actionable, teams can use a concise checklist during design and code reviews:
- Password storage
- Login flow
- Password policy
- MFA
- Reset and change flows
Embedding these into internal standards, PR templates, and runbooks aligns Niyava’s engineering practice with OWASP recommendations and materially reduces account takeover risk.
