Authentication failures in atlassian-stash-audit.log for every git operation, but users not seeing any failures.

[Neil]

In atlassian-stash-audit.log I am seeing lots of AuthenticationFailureEvent

It seems to be happening for every git operation, but the git operations work fine with no complaints from the client hosts. 

This is what an example looks like

10.230.10.93,127.0.0.1 | AuthenticationFailureEvent | neil.peterson | 1416264597235 | neil.peterson | {"authentication-method":"basic","error":"Invalid username or password."} | @1UUIVUBx1009x10316398x0 | -

This event does not seem to be documented

https://confluence.atlassian.com/dosearchsite.action?where=STASH&spaceSearch=true&queryString=AuthenticationFailureEvent

• Why is this event being generated? / Why do users not see a failure?
• How can I prevent this as a false positive or tell the difference between this and real authentication failures?

[Neil · Accepted solution]

Shortly after posting this I found my own answer, but am leaving the post up for posterity.

The event is not explicitly listed here, but it should be. Nonetheless, this page provides some clues.

UserAuthenticationFailedInvalidAuthenticationEvent

Occurs whenever a user fails to authenticate. Note that this can occur frequently in Stash whenever a command line CLI is used as the initial URL provided to Stash contains a username but no password, which is rejected by Crowd.

• First, that should say Stash, not Crowd, yes?
• Second, removing the user@ from the URL prevents this error from being generated.

So I guess my real question now is: Can I change that URL drop down to not include usernames?

Or is there some other way to stem the FLOOD of AuthenticationFailureEvent errors that we are seeing?

[Evan Hart]

We are seeing the same issue for Atlassian Bitbucket v4.9.1 as of 2017-03-02.

[whereisaaron]

2015 and Stash still does the extact same thing, logging boat-loads of fail positives for the normal HTTP 401 behaviour. Renders the Stash audit logs basically useless.