[Dovecot] stopping dictionary attacks (pop3)

[other at ahhyes.net]

Hi Noel,

Thank you for the hint. I've added what you suggested to the fail2ban 
action.

I've had to resort to firewalling off the pop3 port to my ISP subnets 
and any subnets of ISP's
I use when I am on the go.

This will work for me since it's a personal server with only a few 
external users.
Operators of shared hosting servers certainly wont have that luxury.

I had no choice but to do this. Getting fail2ban to work effectively 
with dovecot is like
trying to make a bad marriage work out.

So, it would appear that dovecot only logs multiple failed auth's for a 
single session in ONE
line of text in a log "failed, X attempts" rather than X lines of 
failures logged. This makes
fail2ban useless in this case. Since one can fail to auth 10 times in a 
single session and fail2ban
will not pick it up.

Some feedback for the author, please try and improve things in this 
area. I really cant see why some
functionality cannot be added as outlined in my original email, to 
disconnect the session after X failed
attempts, and have a variable in a config file that allows some fine 
tuning of that. It's not a lot of code to add,
you could probably do it in less than 10 lines of C.

Cheers.
A.


On 2013-09-03 14:34, Noel wrote:
> On 9/2/2013 8:59 PM, other at ahhyes.net wrote:
>> Hi Guys,
>>
>> I was really hoping a couple of years later this would be
>> addressed... I'm running Dovecot 2.2.5 on FreeBSD.
>>
>> Is there anyway to limit the number of auth attempts allowed in a
>> single session? The reason for this is because I have "fail2ban"
>> setup to firewall out any IP addresses that repeatedly auth fails.
>> The issue occurs when the connection is already in an
>> "established" state and the attacker uses the existing session to
>> hammer away, fail2ban becomes ineffective as dovecot appears to
>> allow the person to attempt authentication ad infinitum.
>>
>> It would be nice if there was config option that would for example
>> cause the software to close the connection after X failed
>> attempts. I use "pf" as the firewall on FreeBSD.
>
> The secret is the "pfctl -k IP" command to drop state for the
> offending IP.  Just add it to your fail2ban action command.
> action = /sbin/pfctl {whatever you have now}  && /sbin/pfctl -k <ip>
>
>
> A nice writeup of fail2ban and pf can be found here:
> http://www.effu.se/2011/03/Integrating-PF-with-Fail2ban-0.9
>
>
>
>
>   -- Noel Jones