API Discovery: What is It and How Does It Work?

Quick Summary: APIs are widely used in organizations today and not knowing about them can pose security risks. Hence, finding and identifying vulnerable APIs is crucial to ensure security. API discovery is the process used to achieve this objective. Keep reading for a complete understanding of this process and how it works.

APIs are the backbone of modern organizations. They have transformed the modern software development landscape. They help distinct applications or systems to communicate and share data. Organizations benefit from them in terms of innovation, improved customer experience, automation, efficiency, and more. Therefore, they are increasing in popularity and APIs have become business-critical today.

It is no surprise that organizations use APIs in large numbers, and they play a role in various business processes. However, many times organizations have limited knowledge of the APIs in production. The lack of visibility of APIs can cause many problems like security risks and business disruptions.

API discovery helps organizations to find all APIs operational in their digital ecosystem and catalog them. This process is helpful to identify weaknesses and avoid potential security risks. Besides this, it also helps to identify APIs that can be reused in other applications.

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What is API Discovery?

It is a process of identifying and cataloging all APIs used in an organization. They include both types of APIs that are used internally and available from third parties. API discovery entails searching for application programming interfaces that fulfill specific criteria like data format, functionality, endpoints, etc.

API discovery can be conducted manually with the help of documentation or forums, or it can be handled with automated API security assessment. Organizations need to search and catalog APIs for many reasons like using existing APIs for their applications. It helps them avoid reinventing the wheel and utilize a prebuilt solution for their digital initiative.

Another important use of this process is in finding Zombie APIs and Shadow APIs. They pose different challenges for organizations and finding them is crucial for application security and compliance. In fact, shadow APIs are dangerous, and they cause security holes.

What are Zombie APIs, Shadow APIs, and hidden APIs? Let’s understand them one by one.

• Zombie or Rogue APIs: These are the application programming interfaces that should have been decommissioned or stopped using, but for any reason, they are still there as an access point. It means they should be out of service, but still operational for reasons like ignorance.

• Shadow APIs: They are also known as undocumented APIs that are used in an organization but are not managed or controlled by it. Typically, these are introduced by developers during development or for other business operations. However, they are not controlled by an organization’s IT or security teams.

Importance of API Discovery

Finding APIs used within your organization is critical for many reasons including strengthening your security posture. As a crucial component of an organization’s ecosystem, they proliferate in various processes. Knowing the API inventory helps you make the right decisions that can help to improve security and operations. It also helps in keeping track of all APIs which simplifies API management. The following are the benefits of discovering APIs in production.

Improved Security

Finding and cataloging APIs is a critical step in API testing to identify security loopholes. For example, with this process, you can track rogue or zombie APIs and Shadow APIs that can compromise your security. Since rogue APIs are operational but they are outdated, they can have loopholes that can cause cyberattacks.

Similarly, Shadow APIs can pose security challenges because they can have critical vulnerabilities. Since they are not managed by your organization, it’s difficult to fix such vulnerabilities. Hence, they can allow attackers to penetrate your systems. So, you can enhance your system security by addressing these problems.

Speed Up Development

API discovery is also useful in finding APIs that can be used for other projects. Today, microservices have become a popular software architecture where APIs play a crucial role. Hence, organizations must use hundreds of APIs.

However, instead of reinventing the wheel, developers can leverage existing APIs for new applications or services. Hence, finding and inventorying all APIs helps developers choose the options for their projects. It accelerates the development process and saves time.

Better Testing

Testing is also a good use case for API discovery. It reduces the burden of testers and makes testing more efficient. They can find all used APIs that help in their work and conduct application testing more quickly. Testers can perform testing at a faster speed with the same testing quality. The process of identifying APIs also helps testers to ensure that the latest APIs are being used.

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How Does API Discovery Work?

When it comes to discovering application programming interfaces used in an organization, it can be complex and resource-intensive or quick and easy based on which discovery method you choose. There are two ways you can discover APIs: manual and automated. Let’s understand these methods below.

Manual Method

Manual API discovery as the name suggests is a process to identify all used APIs manually through documentation or other means. It is a slow process that requires a lot of labor work. In this process, the developers or testers will have to go through the documentation or directory. They can search online for information about APIs or ask the developer community to get the details.

Automated Method

The automatic process of discovering APIs is the most efficient way to find an organization’s APIs. It involves using automated tools or scanners that find and index APIs. They significantly reduce the time compared to the manual method. Using automated scanning, developers can easily find APIs with different criteria like keywords, functionality, or tags.

How API Discovery is Helpful in Security?

Security is one of the most crucial requirements for making your APIs discoverable. Since they are a vital part of your overall digital ecosystem, protecting them from security risks is critical for a comprehensive enterprise security strategy.

Moreover, APIs often have a wide range of welities that enable attackers to breach their security and gain unauthorized access to your systems. Discovering and cataloging APIs helps you identify risky assets, and it also provides actionable insights.

It offers the following critical insights:

• Lack of encryption: In most cases, APIs handle sensitive data that must be protected with strong security controls. Encryption response and requests by APIs help to protect from attackers. By discovering APIs, you can determine the requirement for encryption to enhance security.

• API misuse: Another serious security issue unearthed in the process of discovering APIs is the suspicious use. A sudden increase in traffic is a red flag for security. It is possible to investigate such scenarios during the discovery phase.

• Shadow APIs: These hidden APIs can be unearthed with the discovery phase to mitigate the security associated with them.

• Lack of authentication: In many cases, APIs have weak authentication or lack any authentication mechanism that puts them at the risk of compromising security. The discovery phase helps to address these issues.

• Data exposure: APIs should expose information only per their specifications. You can identify excessive information exposure with the discovery phase.

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To Wrap Up

APIs are used everywhere from conventional applications to modern microservices-based solutions. While they are crucial to your organization, they can also pose many challenges related to security and compliance. Further, you need to know all APIs to perform vulnerability assessment. Hence, finding and cataloging all APIs used in your organization is important. API discovery is the right process to achieve this objective.

Besides security, you also need to discover APIs to track their usage, utilize them in other projects, or manage them according to your digital strategy. No matter the reason, you need the right API discovery method to find your APIs quickly and easily. The best way is to use automation tools like ZeroThreat to detect all your APIs in minutes as well as provide security analysis. Scan your APIs using OpenAPI/Swagger schema and catalog to track all of them.