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login-defense

Progressive login protection for PHP: track failed attempts, escalate to a captcha challenge, then to a timed lockout — with the escalation policy explicit, configurable and tested. Framework-agnostic core, thin Laravel bridge included.

Why this exists

"Why not just use the framework's rate limiter?" The built-ins are binary — under the limit you pass, over it you're blocked. Real attacks live in between: slow credential stuffing that stays under any sane limit, distributed attempts that never trip a per-IP counter. Production needs graduated friction — cheap for legitimate users, increasingly expensive for automation — plus an explicit, auditable policy for when each step engages. This package makes that escalation a first-class, configurable, tested object instead of scattered if statements in a controller.

"Why is the core framework-agnostic?" Because abuse mitigation is domain logic, not HTTP plumbing. The rules for when to demand a captcha do not depend on whether the request arrived through Laravel, Symfony, or a queue worker. Keeping the decision in pure PHP behind PSR interfaces means it is testable without booting a framework — and the core test suite proves it by running with no framework installed at all.

Install

Requires PHP 8.3+. The core depends only on PSR interfaces (simple-cache, event-dispatcher, clock, http-client, http-factory, http-server-middleware) — installing this package pulls in no framework.

The optional Laravel bridge supports Laravel 12 and 13, both covered by CI, and is auto-discovered when illuminate/support is present.

Publish the config (Laravel):

The escalation ladder

The decision is a pure function of the failure count on a key and the config:

retryAfter starts at base_seconds (60s) and doubles with each further failure until it hits max_seconds (1h), where it stays. All thresholds and windows are configurable in config/login-defense.php.

Usage

Framework-agnostic core

The application owns its authentication; the guard owns the escalation decision.

A ready-made PSR-15 middleware is included for stacks that prefer to gate the route directly.

Laravel

Attach the middleware to your login route:

It reads the identifier (email or username), the client IP and captcha_token from the request, and short-circuits with 429 (locked out) or 422 (captcha required). Reporting the auth outcome stays with your controller via LoginGuard::recordFailure() / recordSuccess() — the middleware enforces consequences, it does not guess whether your credentials were correct. Set login-defense.enabled to false and the middleware becomes a pass-through, with Laravel's default behaviour unchanged.

Security decisions, and why

Each of these is a deliberate call, commented at the point it is made in the code.

• Combined key for lockout. Keying on IP alone lets one NAT'd office lock out everyone behind it and does nothing against distributed attempts; keying on the username alone hands an attacker a denial-of-service against the victim's own account. The lockout key is identifier + IP (hashed), narrowing a lock to "this account, from this source". A separate, looser global per-IP throttle raises friction to a captcha when one IP is noisy across many usernames — but it never locks, precisely so it cannot take out a shared office.

• No user enumeration. Escalation is driven only by the attempt count on the key, never by whether a user record was found. The same code path and the same response shape run whether or not the account exists, so neither the body nor the timing leaks its existence.

• Captcha outage: fail-closed by default. If the captcha provider times out, the challenge stands (fail_open = false) — a provider we cannot reach must not wave traffic through. It is configurable. Either way, a provider outage never escalates a user into a lockout: you are not punished for the provider's downtime.

• No secrets in logs. Events (CaptchaRequired, AccountLockedOut) carry the hashed key and the decision — never the submitted password or the captcha token. The provider secret travels in the POST body, never a URL, and never appears in an exception message.

• Reset semantics. A successful authentication clears the counter for that key. The global per-IP throttle is intentionally left to decay on its own TTL, so one user's success does not hand a co-tenant attacker a clean slate.

Tradeoff: counter atomicity

The bundled PsrCacheAttemptStore is backed by PSR-16, which has no atomic increment. Its increment() is a read-modify-write, so under concurrent requests two processes can both read a sub-threshold count, both add one, and both be let through — the effective threshold can be exceeded by roughly the number of in-flight requests.

This is not hidden. AttemptStore is an interface precisely so a backend with a native atomic counter (e.g. Redis INCR) can implement the same contract race-free, with no change to the decision logic above it. For production under sustained or adversarial load, back the tracker with such a store. The bundled PSR-16 store is correct for development, low-traffic apps, and the test suite.

The architecture is the point

Two layers, one seam, visible in the directory structure:

Core/ imports nothing from Bridge/ and nothing from Illuminate\*. The proof is a CI job that installs no framework at all and runs the core suite against it:

The bridge job runs four cells — PHP 8.3/8.4 × Laravel 12/13 — with each Laravel major pinned to its matching Testbench major (12 → Testbench 10, 13 → Testbench 11).

Every push runs composer audit, pint --test, phpstan analyse (level 6, larastan on the bridge, no baseline, no ignores) and both suites.

Scope

Out of scope, on purpose:

• MFA / TOTP. It answers a different question ("is this the right person?") than abuse mitigation ("is this traffic automated?"), and Laravel Fortify already covers it. A separate concern belongs in a separate package.
• A Symfony bridge — planned, not in this release. The core is already framework-free, so a Symfony bundle is a thin addition later; shipping it separately keeps this release small.
• No UI, no routes, no captcha widget rendering, no IP reputation feeds.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.