API Security: Understand What It Is and Learn Its Best Practices

To delve into the topic of API security, we need to contextualize ourselves with the era we live in. You’ve likely heard of the Internet of Things (IoT) and how it's integrated into every area of our society.

Today, nearly all services rely on the integration of applications, software, or systems executed by end users. This integration is secure thanks to API security.

However, with significant technological advancements, these applications and software are constantly facing attacks from malicious agents, as we will explain in the following text.

Here, we also highlight the importance of investing in API security and the main challenges to achieving this goal. Stay tuned!

What are APIs and how does their security work?

Before we dive into the security aspect, let's better understand what APIs are.

API stands for Application Programming Interface. In Portuguese, it refers to an interface for programming applications. In other words, an API is a way for software to interact. If a program or application has an API, external clients can request services from it.

For example, this is what happens with Google Maps when it's adapted for use on other websites, like hotel pages. This is possible through an API used by the hotel’s website developers to integrate Google Maps' code.

Got it so far?

API security is a process of evolving APIs to protect against cyber attacks. It is an essential component of web application security. Most modern web applications depend on APIs, which introduces additional security risks by allowing third parties to access them.

A good comparison is to think of a company that opens its office to the public: having more people in the premises, some of whom may be unknown to the company's employees, presents greater risk.

Similarly, an API allows external people to use a program, introducing more risks to the API service’s infrastructure.

Understand the Importance of API Security

Companies primarily use APIs to connect services and transfer data. When APIs are compromised, exposed, or hacked, they can lead to major data breaches.

How a company approaches API security depends on the type of data being transferred. If the company uses an API that connects to a third-party application, understand how that application channels information back to the internet.

Thus, ensuring API security involves using resources and adopting protective procedures.

API security for a company encompasses the services that use them and should prevent malicious actors from accessing confidential data and performing unauthorized actions.

Common API Security Risks

Since APIs connect different systems and handle large volumes of data, they are frequent targets of malicious attacks.

Therefore, it's crucial to implement measures to ensure that only authorized applications and developers can interact with your APIs. Here are some risks and how they affect APIs:

Authentication-Based Attacks

In this case, some clients need to authenticate before making API requests so the server can understand and reject requests from unknown or illegitimate sources.

There are various ways to achieve this, but each method is susceptible to compromise.

For example, an attacker could obtain legitimate client credentials, steal an API key, or intercept and use an authentication token.

DoS and DDoS Attacks

These involve sending numerous requests to an API, which can slow down or halt the service for other clients.

In these attacks, some attackers direct an excessive number of requests to an API in a Denial of Service (DoS) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.

Authorization Errors

Authorization determines the access level each user has. If authorization is not managed carefully, an API client might access data that shouldn't be available to them, increasing the risk of data breaches.

Vulnerability Exploits

Have you heard of vulnerability exploitation?

This occurs when an attacker sends specially crafted data to a target, exploiting a flaw in the target's construction.

These flaws, known as "vulnerabilities," can give an attacker various forms of unintended access to an API or its corresponding application.

The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) maintains a list of the top 10 API vulnerabilities, such as SQL injection, incorrect security configuration, and others. If targeting an unknown vulnerability, it's called a zero-day threat.

These are extremely difficult threats to counter.

Best Practices for Ensuring API Security

You likely have some safeguards in place for your assets or valued items, right?

API security follows the same principle. It's essential to ensure a trustworthy environment with authentication and authorization policies during data or information exchanges.

Here are some common ways to strengthen API security:

Rate Limits and Throttling

Set quotas for how often your API can be called and track its usage over time. More API calls can indicate abuse.

It could also be a programming error, such as calling the API in an infinite loop. Implement rate-limiting rules to protect your APIs from spikes and DoS attacks.

Signatures and Encryption

Ensure data encryption using methods like TLS.

Require signatures to ensure that only the correct users are decrypting and modifying your data.

Tokens

Assign trusted identities and control access to services and resources using tokens assigned to these identities.

Attention to API Security and Management

Naturally, API security can be summarized as good API management.

Additionally, various API management platforms support three types of security schemes:

1. An API key, which is a unique token string (i.e., a string providing unique authentication information); 2. Basic authentication (APP ID / APP Key), which is a two-token string solution (i.e., username and password); 3. OpenID Connect (OIDC), a simple identity layer on top of the popular OAuth framework (i.e., verifies the user by obtaining basic profile information and using an authentication server).

When selecting an API manager, understand which and how many of these security schemes it can handle and have a plan for incorporating the API security practices described above.

Start 2023 by investing in your company’s security!

Data breaches are alarming, but you can take steps to enhance security. Having someone to prevent these breaches is crucial.

In addition to providing more knowledge for you and your IT department, BugHunt is Brazil's first Bug Bounty platform, a reward program for identifying vulnerabilities, committed to information security and privacy for users and/or clients.

Contact us to learn more!