Why

Temporary account lockout after several failed attempts is an easy target for denial of service: a fixed lockout policy lets an attacker lock selected users out of the site. Locking the account/IP pair instead is better against denial of service but weaker against botnets and proxies, and harder to implement correctly. Device cookies are a variant of account/IP blocking that uses a browser cookie instead of an IP address. The throttle trusts a client that logged in before and locks it out individually. All untrusted clients share one temporary lockout per account. That bounds the guesses against an account to DEVICE_COOKIE_ATTEMPTS_PER_PERIOD per DEVICE_COOKIE_PERIOD regardless of the size of the botnet.

Installation

1. Add "django_device_cookies" to INSTALLED_APPS.

2. Add "django_device_cookies.middleware.DeviceCookieMiddleware" to MIDDLEWARE.

3. Put "django_device_cookies.backends.DeviceCookieBackend" first in AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS, before ModelBackend or your own backends.

4. Run manage.py migrate.

With two backends, a call to login() for a user that did not come from authenticate() must pass backend, as the Django documentation says.

django_device_cookies.backends.DeviceCookieModelBackend is ModelBackend with the throttle built in, for projects that want a single entry. Django stores the path of the backend that authenticated a user in the session. Replacing ModelBackend with it logs out every existing session.

Settings

The defaults:

DEVICE_COOKIE_NAME = "django_device"
DEVICE_COOKIE_PERIOD = timedelta(minutes=15)
DEVICE_COOKIE_ATTEMPTS_PER_PERIOD = 5
DEVICE_COOKIE_MAX_AGE = timedelta(days=365)
DEVICE_COOKIE_SECURE = True
DEVICE_COOKIE_SAMESITE = "Lax"
DEVICE_COOKIE_DOMAIN = None
DEVICE_COOKIE_PATH = "/"
DEVICE_COOKIE_PER_USER = False
DEVICE_COOKIE_REVOKE_AFTER_FAILURES = None

DEVICE_COOKIE_PER_USER sets one cookie per user instead of per browser. DEVICE_COOKIE_REVOKE_AFTER_FAILURES stops trusting a cookie after that many failures over its life.

Password reset

An attacker can keep the untrusted lockout for an account in place, which blocks its user from logging in from a new device. OWASP suggests issuing a device cookie when the user visits a password reset link, since that proves possession of the email account. An actual password reset is not necessary. django_device_cookies.views.PasswordResetConfirmView does this. Add it to your URLs before include("django.contrib.auth.urls"):

from django_device_cookies.views import PasswordResetConfirmView

path(
    "accounts/reset/<uidb64>/<token>/",
    PasswordResetConfirmView.as_view(),
    name="password_reset_confirm",
),

It renders registration/password_reset_confirm.html, like Django’s view.

Signals

django_device_cookies.signals.lockout

Sent when an account or a device reaches the failed attempt limit.

Arguments sent with this signal:

sender

The FailedAuthenticationAttempt class.

username

The normalized username.

device

The device cookie nonce, or "" for untrusted clients.

request

The current HttpRequest, or None.

Maintenance

Nothing removes expired failed attempts automatically. The clear_device_cookie_attempts management command deletes them. Run it on a regular basis, for example as a daily cron job.

Limitations

• The throttle covers only calls to authenticate() and aauthenticate(). Calls without a request count as untrusted.

• Attempts sent in parallel can exceed the limit.

• If Django masks your USERNAME_FIELD in the user_login_failed signal, the throttle ignores calls without a request that pass it by name.

System checks

• device_cookies.E001: AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS has no device cookie backend. Nothing throttles logins.

• device_cookies.W001: The device cookie backend is not first in AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS. A locked-out client that knows the password still logs in.

• device_cookies.E002: MIDDLEWARE has no device cookie middleware. No client gets a device cookie, and every login attempt counts as untrusted.

• device_cookies.E003: <setting> must be <expected>.

• device_cookies.E004: Browsers reject a SameSite=None cookie that is not Secure. No client gets a device cookie.

• device_cookies.E005: AUTHENTICATION_BACKENDS has only the device cookie backend. Nothing authenticates.

• device_cookies.W003: Django masks USERNAME_FIELD <field> in the user_login_failed signal. The throttle ignores calls to authenticate() without a request that pass it by name.

This check runs only with the --deploy option:

• device_cookies.W002: DEVICE_COOKIE_SECURE is off. Browsers send device cookies over HTTP.