What distinguishes API security from authentication for mobile and web applications?

1 What is API security?

API security is the set of measures and techniques that protect your application programming interfaces (APIs) from unauthorized access, manipulation, or abuse. As APIs are the interfaces that allow your app to communicate with other apps, services, or databases, and they can expose sensitive or valuable information or functionality, it is essential to ensure that only legitimate and authorized requests can access your APIs, and that the data exchanged is encrypted and validated. Common API security threats include man-in-the-middle attacks, injection attacks, denial-of-service attacks, and API hijacking. To prevent these and other attacks, you need to implement various API security measures such as using secure protocols like HTTPS, SSL/TLS, or OAuth; applying rate limiting, throttling, or caching; validating and sanitizing input and output; applying security policies, roles, and permissions; and monitoring and logging activity.

3 How do API security and authentication differ?

API security and authentication are both important for mobile and web applications, yet they are distinct. API security is about protecting your APIs from external attacks, while authentication is about verifying user identities. The former applies to communication between your app and the API, whereas the latter applies to communication between your app and the user. API security is a technical and operational issue, while authentication is a user experience and business one.

However, API security and authentication are also related and interdependent. For instance, you need to authenticate users before they can access your APIs, as well as secure your APIs before you can authenticate users. Additionally, you can use API security methods such as tokens or OAuth to implement authentication in your app, or use authentication methods such as biometric factors or social login to enhance the security of your app. Ultimately, it's essential to balance the level of security and the ease of authentication for your app depending on the type and sensitivity of data or functionality exposed by your app and APIs.

Therefore, when designing and developing mobile and web applications, it's important to consider both API security and authentication in tandem, using best practices and tools for each.

4 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?