Best API Security Practices to Safeguard Business Applications

Quick Summary: Robust API security is pivotal for securing your applications and business systems. This article covers the top API security best practices that will help you achieve excellence in this aspect. Keep reading for detailed information to follow these practices.

With the growing complexity of IT infrastructure in today’s organizations, APIs play a critical role in connecting and exchanging data between diverse applications. Considering their mission-critical role in organizations, cyber criminals are always poised to attack this aspect to break into the network.

That’s why API security is vital for secure data transfer and to leverage this technology without defeat. Securing APIs requires the right strategy and steps that align with prevalent standards. In this article, we will shed light on some of API security best practices you can utilize to enhance security of application programming interfaces.

Keep reading for fundamentals of API security, best practices, and to know common threats to API security.

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What is API Security and Why It’s Important?

In short, it is essentially a practice to safeguard APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) from unauthorized uses and cyberattacks. API security includes managing access control and privacy as well as identifying vulnerabilities to thwart cyberattacks.

Since application programming interfaces typically work on public networks, attackers can easily access them. While following the best practices is crucial to build secure APIs, security testing helps to find vulnerabilities that can become a potential threat. Security testing and best practices together help to ensure enhanced security of application programming interfaces.

Billions of data have been breached worldwide in cyberattacks as of now and many of these records were exposed due to vulnerabilities in APIs. Weaknesses in API security can become an endpoint of data breach. Such data breaches cost you customer trust and credibility. Hence, weak API security can result in significant reputational and financial loss.

What are Some Best Practices for API Security?

APIs make the life of developers easier by allowing integration of two distinct applications. For example, developers can utilize third-party PayPal API to integrate into an eCommerce application to allow users to make payments online.

As a result, developers need not put extra effort into building a standalone payment system from scratch. They can leverage an existing reliable payment platform.

However, the use of APIs can also put applications at risk if they lack proper security measures. Security weaknesses in APIs are like open doors for cyberattacks. The following are API security best practices to follow to achieve greater protection.

Use Encryption for Secure Communication

Don’t leave internal or external communication clear and use encryption to convert it into code. Encryption will ensure that the information is secure and doesn't go into the wrong hands. The best approach to ensure secure communication between the API and the consumer is using HTTPS and TLS (Transport Layer Security).

HTTPS and TLS will prevent hackers from intercepting, modifying, or stealing sensitive information. Encryption is also important to protect data in databases, files, or storage systems. It can be done with encryption techniques like column-level encryption, file encryption, or transparent data encryption.

Authentication is Important

In the digital world, checking authenticity is vital to ensure that the person is the same they claim to be. Similarly, checking authenticity of a user accessing your API helps you protect it from malicious actors. Adding a layer of authentication will verify the identity of a user before permission to call the API is granted.

There are many ways used for authentication:

• Basic Access Authentication: It is basic HTTP transaction authentication that requires only user ID and password to grant access.
• API Key: It’s a unique identifier that can be used to authenticate applications that API gateways can recognize.
• IdP Token: Identity Provider (IdP) server generates this token that can be used to authenticate users.

Basic user authentication is better for simple user authentication with least security priority. API keys can identify applications not the end users. However, you should also follow API key security best practices to ensure that the key is restricted from unauthorized access. Generate, store, and manage keys security.

IdP token that uses multifactor authentication is the safest bet for high-end security for applications dealing with a lot of personally identifiable information.

Leverage Input Validation for APIs

Validating input data before processing it provides additional security to APIs. This method involves inspecting the input data for allowed values, formats, types, lengths, etc. It helps to avoid security vulnerabilities like injection attacks and errors like buffer overflows.

Another aspect is sanitizing the API output by eliminating unwanted characters like HTML elements, JavaScript, and SQL code. When your API returns this data without sanitization, cyber attackers can exploit it. Sanitization protects from Cross-site Scripting (XSS) and other injection attacks.

Besides this, using prepared statements and parameterized queries help prevent SQL injection threats. Users’ input will be treated as data instead of executable instructions with these precautions making attacks more difficult.

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Prefer OAuth and OpenID Connect

Delegating the authorization and/or authentication of APIs to a trusted third party IdP (Identity Provider) can offer better security. OAuth and OpenID Connect are two important standards that help in secure authentication and authorization for APIs.

While OAuth is a secure method that allows a client to access resources on behalf of a user, OpenID Connect provides user authentication as well as one time sign in with SSO for many applications.

OAuth generates tokens that a user can utilize to access APIs. A user’s personal information is protected with the use of tokens. Further, it also protects APIs from unauthorized access due to the exchange of only tokens.

OAuth and OpenID Connect helps you leverage trusted third-party IdPs like Google, Azure Active Directory, or Facebook to authenticate and authorize API users.

Restrict Number of Requests

Limiting the number of requests in a specific time frame is one of the most useful API security best practices. It is an effective approach to avoid DoS (Denial-of-Service) attacks and abuse. It ensures that the API is available for real users and prevents attackers from bombarding your system with excessive requests.

Besides this, you can also define quota for a specific user, IP address, or application to restrict excessive requests. It ensures fair allocation of resources and avoids misuse. Adaptive limiting of requests is an advanced measure you can adopt to limit the number of requests based on traffic, resource usage, and user behavior.

Use API Firewall for a Strong Frontier

You must be aware of network firewalls that protect a network and filter the traffic. It works like a wall, a single endpoint for incoming and outgoing network traffic. Similarly, you can offer additional protection to your API with the use of a firewall. The firewall can filter malicious traffic and monitor incoming requests based on preset rules and policies.

You can leverage ACL (Access Control Lists) to define policies to access the API. It will restrict access based on the defined rules and policies for different users, applications, and IP addresses. It is robust approach to protect unwarranted use of your API. The firewall monitors the traffic to help you identify potential security incidents and quickly respond in that case.

Go for an API Security Gateway

It is a kind of software that is designed to protect APIs from external threats. This security gateway works as a proxy between the client and the API and monitors traffic to detect potential threats. It can authorize and authenticate users, apply security policies, and provides secure communications between the client and the application programming interface.

You can implement some security features on the gateway side and make your API more scalable and easier to manage. The gateway takes various responsibilities such as authentication, limiting requests, encryption, authorization, and more. By monitoring and analyzing traffic, you can also detect anomalies and prevent unwarranted behavior.

Stay Updated About Security Threats

It is better to be cautious and stay updated on various security threats. Update yourself about API security best practices OWASP to prevent security threats such as OWASP Top 10. Regularly monitor APIs and check logs to know what’s going with it.

By following this practice, you can detect issues early and take the appropriate actions to avoid potential cyberattacks. As they say prevention is better than cure, take this philosophy by heart and manage your security mechanisms accordingly.

Critical API Security Challenges to Know

Let’s check out some of the most critical API security challenges that should be addressed immediately.

Authentication and Authorization

Ensuring only authenticated users or systems can access the API and enforcing robust authentication and authorization mechanisms is a complex task. Preferrable authentication methods like OAuth, API keys, or JWT (JSON Web Tokens) have to be properly implemented and must be in a place to control and oversee what activities are done by legitimate users and what they are allowed to do.

Data Exposure

APIs often manage confidential data which includes personal, financial, or proprietary information. Ensuring that there is no unintentional or intentional data transmission through API responses is quite a challenging task.

Injection Attacks

APIs can be vulnerable to different injection attacks, such as SQL or NoSQL injection, where harmful data is inserted into a request to obtain unauthorized access to the database. Proper input validation and sanitization are important steps to avoid such kinds of attacks by ensuring that input data is clean and expected.

Rate Limiting

To avoid data abuse and denial of service attacks (DoS), APIs must perform rate limiting to control the number of requests a user or client generally creates within a particular time period. Implementation of rate limiting process is a challenging process to control excessive requests.

API Endpoint Security

Every API endpoint represents a potential attack surface. Securing endpoints involves implementation of complex processes like staunching authentication and authorization checks, as well as safeguarding against potential vulnerabilities. Making endpoints unbending enough to resist attacks such as unauthorized access or data breaches is also challenging.

API Documentation

API documentation is of high value for developers, but it can also pose significant security risks if there is accidental sensitive data exposure about API’s endpoints, structure, or functionality. Hence, managing and ensuring documentation does not unintentionally provide attackers with insights into potential security weaknesses is challenging.

Injection Attacks

Injection attacks like SQL or NoSQL are capable of causing huge risk to the organizations by inserting malicious code into a request to manipulate users or obtain unauthorized data accessibility. Implementing proper input validation and sanitization is essential to mitigate the risk of injection attacks but it’s a time-consuming and a challenging task.

API Endpoint Security

Each API endpoint represents a potential attack surface. Businesses need to perform complex and time-consuming authentication methods and techniques that perform comprehensive security checks and safeguard APIs against common vulnerabilities.

What are Some Common API Security Threats?

There are several risks to API security that arise due to poor usage practice and security flaws. Let’s these risks as follows:

• Injection Attacks: It involves injection malicious code into the target API. For example, an attacker can inject a tampered SQL query to delete data.
• Insecure Direct Object References: A vulnerability that makes direct references to internal resources visible to attacker that can manipulate it for unauthorized access.
• Broken Authentication: An attacker exploits the weak authentication mechanism causing identify theft making the attacker masquerade as user.
• Exposure of Sensitive Information: A security issue where APIs expose their data due to poor coding practice and not sanitization of output.

Check for Vulnerabilities that Most Tools Fail to Detect and Prevent All Cyberattacks Perform a Security Check

Pro Tip: Test Your APIs with a Robust DAST Tool for End-to-End Security

DAST, elaborated as Dynamic Application Security Testing, is an approach to find vulnerabilities in APIs and applications while they are running. It is an excellent way to detect API weaknesses and fix them before they become a potential threat.

ZeroThreat is a super-friendly and super-fast API security testing tool to detect vulnerabilities quickly and accurately. High accuracy of this tool helps you find most vulnerabilities that reduces the time in manual pen testing by 90%.

It works without any complex configurations and being a fully cloud-based solution, it is readily available from any device or platform. With a powerful scanning mechanism, ZeroThreat saves you critical time by providing priority-based results to help you take necessary actions quickly.