With our overdependence on technology, there has been an increase in the need to secure our APIs to reduce the rising threat of security risks and unauthorized access. As you already know, APIs allow the various computer programs in your system to communicate with each other; hence, their security is highly important given the amount of sensitive data passed between them.
There have also been reports from multiple security teams that API vulnerabilities have become the go-to area for most API attacks. With all that knowledge, the question remains about what you can do to ensure API protection and application security. Therefore, we’ve developed this post to help educate you on what API security is. We’ve also included the most common API Security Best Practices and the different practices that you can adopt to ensure the security of your web APIs.
What is API Security?
API security is the process of ensuring that your company’s web API and REST APIs are protected from misuse and attacks, mainly as a result of unauthorized access and data breaches. Therefore, the main goal of API security is to ensure that all API requests are authorized, validated, authenticated, and free from any malicious code that may cause harm to the API ecosystem
Common API Security Risks Facing Web APIs
There are multiple security attacks that a web API faces, and here are some of the most common ones:
- Cross-site scripting – is an API attack whereby an API vulnerability allows an attacker to insert malicious code into the code of your web API or application.
- Man in the middle – is an attack where the attacker intercepts the API traffic between the web API and the client application, or it can occur between the API endpoints and the web API
- Injection – This attack involves an attacker inserting malicious code or commands into a program. An excellent example of an injection attack in REST APIs is SQL injection. With SQL injection, the attacker can gain complete control of the SQL database
- Credential stuffing – this is one of the most popular security risks that web APIs face since it involves using stolen credentials at API endpoints to gain unauthorized access. This can be prevented by using an API key
- Denial of service – this kind of API attack involves flooding the system with more API traffic than the system can handle, thus making the API services unavailable
Best Practices for Securing APIs
As stated above, there are multiple security threats that web APIs face. Still, there are some practices that you can implement to assure you of your web API and application security. These practices include:
Implementing API Gateways
An API gateway is designed to centralize all the API traffic features and apply them to each API request that goes through your API. These features include rate limiting, issuing API keys, and blocking any unauthorized access to the system or network.
Authorization and authentication
One of the most effective practices to assure your API security is authentication and authorization. This practice mainly involves the client application receiving a token to validate the client. Also, you can choose to use standards like JSON, OpenID Connect, and OAuth 2.0 web tokens to authenticate API traffic, which users can access API resources and define access control rules.
Initiate access control
To grant access to your internal sensitive data to third parties, you must initiate access control using your API management tool. Access control allows you to identify who, what and when specific data was accessed, created, or deleted from the system. One way that you can achieve this is by creating a web application firewall to act as a filter.
Encryption
As stated above, one of the common API security threats is the man in the middle; therefore, you should encrypt all your API requests and responses to prevent such an attack. Also, you can decide to implement transport layer security (TLS) which tends to encrypt your API requests and responses while they are in transit.
Perform Regular Security Tests
As you already know, prevention is always better than cure; therefore, it’s highly advised to conduct regular API security tests. These tests are primarily designed to allow you to detect API vulnerabilities before they become a huge problem.
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