Secure your API’s — Follow Best Practices
We will look at how APIs can pose risks to your data and infrastructure — and what you can do to secure them.
It’s critical that organisations adhere to some basic security best practices and employ well-established security controls if they intend to share their APIs publicly.
API security is the practice of protecting application program interfaces (APIs) from misuse and malicious attacks. This is critical for your own internal APIs, as well as external third party APIs you may be leveraging. Because APIs interact with your company’s applications, securing APIs is essential.
External APIs have public-facing endpoints. So, their vulnerabilities are often the target of hackers. Internal APIs face the risk of improper access or misuse.
Common Attacks against Web APIs
SQL injection is a specific type of injection attack, enabling an attacker to gain control of an SQL database.
Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of injection attack that occurs when a vulnerability enables an attacker to insert a malicious script (often JavaScript) into the code of a web app or webpage.
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks make a network, system, or website unavailable to intended users, typically by flooding it with more traffic than it can handle. API endpoints are among the growing list of DDoS targets.
Man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks occur when an attacker intercepts traffic between two communicating systems and impersonates each to the other, acting as an invisible proxy between the two. With APIs, MitM attacks can occur between the client (app) and the API, or between the API and its endpoint.
Credential stuffing is the use stolen credentials on API authentication endpoints to gain unauthorized access.
By adopting API security best practices, you can protect your business.
- Prioritize security by Identify vulnerabilities
API security shouldn’t be an afterthought or considered “someone else’s problem.” Organizations have a lot to lose with unsecured APIs, so make security a priority and build it into your APIs as they’re being developed.
The only way to effectively secure APIs is to know which parts of the API lifecycle are insecure. Of course, that’s easier said than done, especially as the organization’s use of APIs scales. It is important to consider the whole API lifecycle, since APIs need to be considered software artifacts on their own and, as such, must follow a complete lifecycle, including maintenance and retirement.
2. Best Policies For Securing APIs
One of the most important aspects of API security is access control for authentication and authorization
Applying the best security policies is a critical step for securing your APIs.
OAuth
OAuth is one of the most well-known security policies. It allows applications to request access from third party systems. And you can apply OAuth to ensure secure authorization.
JWT
JWT is another well-known security policy. It allows you to share security information between two parties: a client and a server.
3. Encrypt traffic using TLS
Some organizations may choose not to encrypt API payload data that is considered non-sensitive (for example, weather service data), but for organizations whose APIs routinely exchange sensitive data (such as login credentials, credit card, social security, banking information, health information), TLS encryption should be considered essential
All data, especially personally identifiable data, should be encrypted using a method such as Transport Layer Security (TLS). Developers should also require signatures to ensure that only authorized users are decrypting and modifying data.
4. Use rate limiting and throttling
As APIs’ popularity increases, so, too, does the target on their backs. APIs are a prime target for DDoS attacks, for example. To avoid DDoS attacks, as well as API spikes and other issues that affect performance and security, place rate limits on how and how often your API can be called. Rate limiting can also throttle connections, balancing access with availability.
5. Validate parameters
Validating parameters will help ensure that incoming data will not cause harm. In this framework, all incoming data is validated against a strict schema that describes permissible inputs to the system.
6. Develop a threat model
Threat modeling is a structured approach to identifying and evaluating risks. Threat models are best used as a preventative measure, but they should also be considered a continuous cycle for assessing, mitigating, and preventing application vulnerabilities in an automated yet controlled fashion.
