My concern with this proposal is that it opens up denials of service, not to twitter.com, but to "associated" sites such as twitpic, or my site twxlate, among others
For example, Lance Armstrong is a heavy user of twitpic. It is very easy for anyone to find Lance's twitter ID (@lancearmstrong), view his status updates, and see that he is a frequent user of twitpic. Now, someone that is "unhappy" with Lance, say one of George Hincapie's ardent fans that really believes that Lance was a significant contributor to George not winning the maillot jeune last Sunday, could go to twitpic, fail to login as Lance the requisite number of times, and deny Lance access to twitpic. Not only celebrities would or could be subject to such denials of service. I notice that @dougw occasionally uses twitpic! :-) One solution to this problem is to add to each twitter account another "private" ID. By default this private ID would be equal to the existing (public) ID (If not equal to the account's public ID, it would have to be unique among all twitter IDs, both public and private.). The public ID would be used just as the existing twitter ID is now: others would use it to follow, mention, DM, etc., the user. But the user MUST use their private ID for authenticated requests through the API, and CAN also use it for non-authenticated requests. In either case, twitter would treat a request from a private ID as if it came from the corresponding public ID. Blocking the public ID because of excessive authentication failures would NOT block the associated private ID unless they were equal. Changing your public ID would also change your private ID if the two were the same before the change, i.e., they would remain the same after the change. It may seem onerous to require all users to also have a private ID, but since it defaults to be the same as their public ID, only those concerned about their service being denied would change it and subsequently use it instead of their public ID to access associated sites such as twitpic or twxlate. In fact, I think this change, though potentially large on the twitter side, could be implemented without any changes to users or associated sites, with one small, obscure exception: now, if I attempt to create a new twitter account or change the ID of an existing account, and find that the ID I want is in use, I can view that account; if this were implemented and I attempted to use a private ID that was not the same as its associated public ID, I could not view the account using the denied ID. Comments expected and welcome. Jim Renkel On Jul 21, 6:00 pm, Doug Williams <d...@twitter.com> wrote: > Devs --A change shipped last week that limited the number of times a user > could access the account/verify_credentials method [1] in a given hour. This > change proved hasty and short-sighted as pointed out by the subsequent > discussion [2]. We apologize to any developer that was adversely > affected. Given the problems, we want to fix this in a > public and transparent manner. > Like most web services, we limit the number of attempts users can make to > login to > their accounts on Twitter.com to prevent brute force dictionary > attacks. This same security is not extended to the platform > and leaves accounts vulnerable to the same method of attack through the API. > > The change we shipped to limit user accounts to 15 calls an hour to the > account/verify_credentials method [1] was intended to mitigate this risk. It > was thought to limit the number of tests a potential attack could run in the > hour, even in a distributed fashion. However, we only protected a single > resource which still leaves all other authenticated methods exposed as a > vector of attack (limited only by the API rate limit). > > Our thinking is now that we will limit the total number of unsuccessful > attempts to access authenticated resources to 15 an hour per user per IP > address. If a single IP address makes 15 attempts to access a protected > resource unsuccessfully for a given user (as indicated by an HTTP 401), then > the user will be locked out of authenticated resources from that IP address > for 1 hour. > > This scheme has all of the positive effects that we need, however we want to > make sure that we have thought through all of the potential problems on the > developer's side before we proceed with this change. Please contribute to > the subsequent discussion if you have an opinion or concern. Once we come to > an agreement, we will update with details and a timeline for shipping this > update. > > 1.http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-account%C2%A0ve... > 2.http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread... > > Regards, > Doug
