The registration throttle called record_failure on every attempt, successful
ones included. Five legitimate signups from one shared or NAT address locked the
sixth real user out for up to 600s, doubling from there — while an attacker
sidestepped the limiter entirely through B-54. Failure backoff is the wrong
instrument here: nothing about creating an account is a failed guess at a
secret, so the only people it reliably punished were the honest ones.
RollingQuota says what was actually meant: 5 accounts per IP per hour, in a
rolling window. The caller over it waits exactly until the oldest of the five
ages out — an accurate Retry-After, and waiting never makes the next wait
longer. It is recorded only once an account exists, so attempts that create
nothing (a taken username, a validation error) leave the quota untouched, and
checked before the Argon2 hash, so an IP out of quota costs nothing to refuse.
Bounded like the failure limiter (B-56): the keys are caller-chosen, so the dict
gets both a sweep and a hard cap, evicting keys with room left in their quota
before full ones.
Also fixes the inline comment that cited B-31 (the resubscribe finding) where it
meant B-33.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
_buckets is keyed by strings the caller chooses — any username, and (before
B-54) any IP — and only ever grew: decay_seconds aged a bucket's counter but
never removed the entry, so hammering login with random usernames was an
unbounded memory leak.
A bucket is "spent" once its lockout has expired *and* its failure count would
decay to zero on the next failure anyway — at which point keeping it and
dropping it are indistinguishable, which is what makes eviction safe. Those are
swept on record_failure (at most once every 60s) and on the read path, so a key
that's merely being probed never leaves an entry behind. That alone holds the
dict at the size of the genuinely active attack surface.
_MAX_BUCKETS = 50_000 is the backstop for a burst faster than the sweep
interval, when nothing has had time to expire. Over it, the entries closest to
expiry go first: what an attacker gets from a successful flood is the loss of
the shallowest, nearly-over lockouts, never the deep ones actually holding an
attack back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
davideandClaude Opus 5