SSHafe: A Real-Time SSH Brute Force Attack Detection and Novel Credential Rotation Standard

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09066v1
• Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2026 03:13:41 GMT
• Title: SSHafe: A Real-Time SSH Brute Force Attack Detection and Novel Credential Rotation Standard
• Abstract summary: SSH is a critical yet heavily targeted protocol for remote system administration.<n>Password-based authentication exposes servers to large-scale brute-force, dictionary, and credential-spray attacks.<n>This work presents SSHafe, a real-time SSH brute-force detection and mitigation system.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: SSH remains a critical yet heavily targeted protocol for remote system administration, with password-based authentication exposing servers to large-scale brute-force, dictionary, and credential-spray attacks. Existing rule-based defences such as Fail2Ban fail to detect slow, distributed, or threshold-aware adversaries, while conventional account-recovery mechanisms: email links, OTPs, and out-of-band verification introduce additional vulnerabilities including phishing, session hijacking, and weak authentication binding. This work presents SSHafe, a real-time SSH brute-force detection and mitigation system that combines time-series feature engineering with a lightweight LightGBM classifier to identify attack patterns directly from system authentication logs. A multi-scale sliding-window approach extracts behavioural features such as attempt rates, inter-arrival times, failure ratios, and username diversity, enabling the model to achieve a detection accuracy of 99.96% on benchmark data and strong performance on unlabeled real-world traffic. Upon detecting an attack, SSHafe automatically blocks the targeted user account and delivers an SSH banner guiding legitimate users to a novel passkey-based password-rotation workflow. The proposed novel password reset standard performs authentication and password update in a single cryptographically bound flow, eliminating the need for sessions, cookies, OTPs, or email-based verification, and mitigating phishing, session hijacking, CSRF, and replay attacks. Experiments on an Azure VM and live adversarial traffic demonstrate that SSHafe can identify and suppress brute-force activity within ten seconds, preventing account compromise even with weak credentials.

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