Challenge logins from new country or device
As a part of the measures for protecting your users against account takeovers, you can choose to activate step-up authentication, whenever the user shows behavior outside normal. Step-up verification can be anything that requires the user to prove that they own the account, like e.g. Multifactor authentication or a simple E-mail verification.
In this guide we'll set up Castle to return a challenge response whenever a user logs in from a new country or device, but you can of course use any logic that meets your definition of suspicious. Once the user has passed the extra verification, It'll be added to an allow list to prevent from being challenged repeatedly.
Overview of the challenge flow we'll set up at login
Step 1. Create the lists
First, head over to the lists management page and create two new lists, illustrated by the 
orange boxes in the flowchart above:
| List Name | Primary Entity | Secondary Entity | Auto-archivation time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Challenged Users | User ID | ||
| Trusted User Devices | User ID | Device Fingerprint | 20160 (14 days) |
From the "Trusted User Devices" list, we'll set the default auto-archivation to 14 days (20160 seconds), but depending on your requirements you may choose to shorten/increase this.
The "Challenged Users" lists only have User ID as primary entitity to make sure that a started verification process always needs to be completed, regardless of which device that attempts the login. You may set the Secondary entity to Devce Fingerprint to only target a specific device with a challenge instead.
Step 2. Create the policies
From the policies page, we'll configure four policies. Once created, make sure to keep them ordered as in the table below, within the $login.succeded group.
| Policy Name | Event | Trigger | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Allow trusted device logins | $login + $succeeded | List-based. "Trusted User Devices" | - Return "allow" action |
| Challenge users in list | $login + $succeeded | List-based. "Challenged Users" | - Return "challenge" action |
| Challenge new device or country | $login + $succeeded | Risk-based. Signals new_device OR new_country | - Add to list "Challenged Users" - Return "challenge" action |
| Trust device on challenge | $challenge + $succeeded | Risk-based. Abuse Score 0-100 | - Add to list "Trusted User Devices" |
Once the policies has been created and re-ordered, remember to enable them by pressing the green toggle button
Forever challenged?
As you may notice, user IDs are never removed from the "Challenged users" list, meaning that every non-trusted user device will be challenged once new device/country is triggered.
To address this you can either 1) set an auto-archivation time on the "Challenged users" list, or 2) or the Lists API to delete the User ID, once the user has passed the additional verification
Updated 4 months ago