Devise::PwnedPassword

Devise extension that checks user passwords against the PwnedPasswords dataset https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords

Based on

https://github.com/HCLarsen/devise-uncommon_password

Recently the HaveIBeenPwned API has moved to a authenticated/paid model , this does not effect the PwnedPasswords API, no payment or authentication is required.

Usage

Add the :pwned_password module to your existing Devise model.

class AdminUser < ApplicationRecord
  devise :database_authenticatable,
         :recoverable, :rememberable, :trackable, :validatable, :pwned_password
end

Users will receive the following error message if they use a password from the PwnedPasswords dataset:

Password has previously appeared in a data breach and should never be used. Please choose something harder to guess.

You can customize this error message by modifying the devise YAML file.

# config/locales/devise.en.yml
en:
  errors:
    messages:
      pwned_password: "has previously appeared in a data breach and should never be used. If you've ever used it anywhere before, change it immediately!"

You can optionally warn existing users when they sign in if they are using a password from the PwnedPasswords dataset. The default message is:

Your password has previously appeared in a data breach and should never be used. We strongly recommend you change your password.

You can customize this message by modifying the devise YAML file.

# config/locales/devise.en.yml
en:
  devise:
    sessions:
      warn_pwned: "Your password has previously appeared in a data breach and should never be used. We strongly recommend you change your password everywhere you have used it."

By default passwords are rejected if they appear at all in the data set. Optionally, you can add the following snippet to config/initializers/devise.rb if you want the error message to be displayed only when the password is present a certain number of times in the data set:

# Minimum number of times a pwned password must exist in the data set in order
# to be reject.
config.min_password_matches = 10

By default the value set above is used to reject passwords and warn users. Optionally, you can add the following snippet to config/initializers/devise.rb if you want to use different thresholds for rejecting the password and warning the user (for example you may only want to reject passwords that are common but warn if the password occurs at all in the list):

# Minimum number of times a pwned password must exist in the data set in order
# to warn the user.
config.min_password_matches_warn = 1

By default responses from the PwnedPasswords API are timed out after 5 seconds to reduce potential latency problems. Optionally, you can add the following snippet to config/initializers/devise.rb to control the timeout settings:

config.pwned_password_open_timeout = 1
config.pwned_password_read_timeout = 2

Disabling in test environments

Because calling a remote API can slow down tests, and requiring non-pwned passwords can make test fixtures needlessly complex (dynamically generated passwords), you probably want to disable the pwned_password check in your tests. You can disable the pwned_password check for the test environments by adding this to your config/initializers/devise.rb file:

config.pwned_password_check_enabled = !Rails.env.test?

If there are any tests that required the check to be enabled (such as tests for specifically testing the flow/behavior for what should happen when a user does try to use, or already have, a pwned password), you can temporarily set Devise.pwned_password_check_enabled = true for the duration of the test (just be sure to reset it back at the end).

To make it easier to turn this check on or off, a with_pwned_password_check (and complimentary without_pwned_password_check) method is provided:

  it "doesn't let you change your password to a compromised password" do
    fill_in 'user_password', with: 'Password'
    with_pwned_password_check do
      click_button 'Save changes'
    end
  end

To use these helpers, add to your test/test_helper.rb or spec/spec_helper.rb:

require 'devise/pwned_password/test_helpers'

If using RSpec, that's all you need to do: It will automaticaly include the helper methods and reset pwned_password_check_enabled to false before every example.

If using Minitest, you also need to add:

  include ::Devise::PwnedPassword::TestHelpers::InstanceMethods

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'devise-pwned_password'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Optionally, if you also want to warn existing users when they sign in, override after_sign_in_path_for

def after_sign_in_path_for(resource)
  set_flash_message! :alert, :warn_pwned if resource.respond_to?(:pwned?) && resource.pwned?
  super
end

This should generally be added in app/controllers/application_controller.rb for a rails app. For an Active Admin application the following monkey patch is needed.

# config/initializers/active_admin_devise_sessions_controller.rb
class ActiveAdmin::Devise::SessionsController
  def after_sign_in_path_for(resource)
      set_flash_message! :alert, :warn_pwned if resource.respond_to?(:pwned?) && resource.pwned?
      super
  end
end

To prevent the default call to the HaveIBeenPwned API on user sign in, add the following to config/initializers/devise.rb:

config.pwned_password_check_on_sign_in = false

Considerations

A few things to consider/understand when using this gem:

• User passwords are hashed using SHA-1 and then truncated to 5 characters, implementing the k-Anonymity model described in https://haveibeenpwned.com/API/v2#SearchingPwnedPasswordsByRange Neither the clear-text password nor the full password hash is ever transmitted to a third party. More implementation details and important caveats can be found in https://blog.cloudflare.com/validating-leaked-passwords-with-k-anonymity/

• This puts an external API in the request path of users signing up to your application. This could potentially add some latency to this operation. The gem is designed to fail silently if the PwnedPasswords service is unavailable.

Contributing

To contribute

• Check the issue tracker and pull requests for anything similar
• Fork the repository
• Make your changes
• Run bin/test to make sure the unit tests still run
• Send a pull request

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.