7 things you can do to enhance API security

Jun 12, 2021

iCrowdMarketing powered by iCrowdNewswire

The value and importance of APIs or Application Programming Interface are on a boom for the last few years to develop applications and systems of the new era. APIs facilitate the integration of multiple systems much easier for the developers, adding an extra benefit for the organizations.

As everything gains popularity and becomes a crucial part of the business, it comes under the target of cybercriminals or hackers. APIs are known as 'the next frontier in cybercrime.' API breaches keep taking place every other day to small enterprises and large organizations like Cisco Systems, Facebook, etc.

What is API Security?

API security is the technique to protect the integrity of both the ones you use for your application and the ones you own for it. An API exposes the organization’s services and its assets in a restricted manner.

API security is to provide security controls to these publically available service APIs. The security policies must ensure that only authenticated or appropriate organizations and individuals access the data via the API. It should also ensure data integrity between the service provider and the consumer.

API security is a point of concern because the developers using them are not very well versed with cybersecurity practices. These reasons make it more essential to secure the APIs of an organization.

Practices to enhance API security

1. Encryption

Information in movement is highly susceptible to external attacks and is vulnerable to security threats. Data and information that is shared must be coded or encrypted. One should not communicate any details directly.

All the members of the organizations should ensure that the employees should cipher all the exchanges with TLS or Transport Layer Security, either by using one-way encryption or mutual encryption. This is the basic building block of API security, and no API must go without it. You can also use digital signatures, encryption with trace tools, tokenization, and data masking.

2. OAuth and OpenID Connect

The API resources should be restricted only to users who are allowed to access them. The client-side of the application must include a token in the API calls being made to the service provider and not the credentials. This practice preserves the secrecy of the consumer, and the API provider can be worry-free because they do not need to take care of protecting authorization data.

OAuth is a standard that how the client-side application obtains an access token, defines many grant types for the accommodation of user experiences and various flows. Based on the incoming tokens, the access rules can be applied.

Open ID Connect standard is an extension of the OAuth 2.0 ID tokens. It aids in adding an identity layer on top of the authorization tokens.

3. Monitoring

Pentesting is the key to restoration in case a problem occurs. The real-time logs and audits share the relevant information on the server, and the history is stored safely for a reasonable time. These logs can turn into valuable assets while debugging the errors or problems.

Monitoring dashboards are a graphical means to display all such details and track records of your API consumption. The logs would help to check traffic patterns or calls and identify malicious activities. Organizations can implement approaches and algorithms to resolve the problem.

4. Minimal sharing

Be paranoid and display the least possible details in the answers and error messages. Lock your email subjects and the content to some pre-existing messages that are not customizable.

Make use of IP blacklist and IP whitelist to limit reach to your resources. Minimize the count of admins, differentiate access into different roles, and preserve the sensitive and confidential information in all the interfaces.

5. Throttling and Rate limitation

Restrict access to your system by permitting a limited number of messages per second. This will help you to protect the backend’s bandwidth as per the capacity of your server. Throttling limits and quotas, if defined appropriately, are an important barrier against the DDOS attacks coming from multiple sources and trying to flood your system with multiple requests.

6. Use API gateway

All the other procedures are time-consuming and require efforts to implement and maintain them. The more mature and sophisticated approach for API Management solutions is using an API Gateway for API security. This will help to secure, control and monitor your traffic.

API gateways are a single point of entry for all the API calls and help you authenticate the API traffic. Organizations must necessarily monitor these APIs to remove those not in use or do not include the new security measures.

7. Look for professional help.

Not every API security practice is as simple to implement as it looks in theory. Organizations and businesses must look out for experienced security service providers to ensure the security of their APIs. These experts and professionals will provide all the mandatory solutions as per the use case of your API.

Closing thoughts

API security, if not taken seriously, can be a major security threat for your organization. There is no scope for leaving loose ends that might result in a major security breach in your organization. Therefore, it is essential to follow the best API security practices and consult security service providers like Astra Security to protect your system.

---

Tags: English