How to effectively obtain the source of a CAPTCHA LOCK in Butbucket Server/DC?

Felix Herzog

Hi,

in our company (about 1000 git users) we have the problem that some users forget where they set up their credentials. Some use Jenkins and configure credentials per job. Some have installed more than 3 GIT clients using different credential-stores... etc. mostly you can't imagine whar crude ideas they have.
The problem is: we have a policy to change the user password in a regularly basis. This leads these users into a problem: always having their account captcha-locked due to password change and not knowing which "client" is causing this.

For me, as admin the Problem is: How can I obtain the IP-address or Repository (for possible job search) a system is trying to access and causes the CAPTCHA lock?

What is the effecitve way to look into the atlassian-bitbucket.log or atlassian-bitbucket-access.log and find an answer to the question:
When and which IP-adress is causing a captcha lock for user <xyz>?

 

looking only for "captcha" in the access-log I only find:

"<IP> | https | o@PE2R7Xx957x831907x1 | - | 2018-10-12 15:57:50,515 | "GET /captcha HTTP/1.1" | "https://gitserveradress/login" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:62.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/62.0" | 200 | 0 | 9220 | - | 275 | 120zft0 |"

this sadly does not answer WHOM account. It also seems it does not show up if a GIT-CLIENT is getting/requesting via pull and gets a captchalock response.

We only have https access enabled.

 

Any ideas? thank you so much.

 

Stephen Sifers

Hello Felix,

First of all, This is a great questions. 

Digging through the logs, Database and audit files I was able to find the following:

As you stated, the access log will show when something is locked out or prompted with a Captcha, but it does not say whom.

Similarly, when you query the database, you can see whom has been locked out and prompted with Captcha, but not from where. Here is the query for that:

SELECT *
FROM cwd_user_attribute as atr
JOIN cwd_user as us ON atr.user_id=us.id
JOIN 
WHERE atr.attribute_name = 'failedAuthenticationAttemptCount' AND atr.attribute_value >= '5' ; 

There is nothing available in either of these logs or correlate Who from Where, which is what you are asking.

With that said, I was able to find what you were looking for within the audit logs of BitBucket. The Audit log is located within your log directory here:

BitBucketDir/log/audit/atlassian-bitbucket-audit.log

 Output within the log is as follows:

0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 | AuthenticationFailureEvent | otheruser | 1111111111111 | otheruser | {"authentication-method":"form","error":"For security reasons you must answer a CAPTCHA question."} | @123456789hgf | bxlqsv

The above output will show IP address, Username, Authentication failure and Captcha question. For more information on the BitBucket Audit log, see here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/audit-logging-in-bitbucket-server-776640417.html

-Stephen Sifers