Account lockout protection prevents user accounts from locking at the underlying user repository based on too many failed authentication attempts. It also adds a layer of protection against brute force and dictionary attacks because the user is locked out for a time period when the number of failed attempts exceeds the threshold. This protection is enabled in many areas of PingFederate, including the HTML Form Adapter, the Username Token Processor, the OAuth resource owner password credentials grant type, and the native authentication scheme for the administrative console and API.

Note:

The HTML Form Adapter and the Username Token Processor provide a per-instance setting for the maximum number of failed attempts such that administrators can use unique values for different instances of the adapter or the token processor.

In a PingFederate clustered environment, depending on the chosen runtime state-management architecture, the account locking-state information is shared across a replica set, multiple replica sets, or all nodes in the cluster.

Settings for account lockout protection are stored in the com.pingidentity.common.security.AccountLockingService.xml configuration file, located in the <pf_install>/pingfederate/server/default/data/config-store directory.