API Security-A tempting product line-I

What is API Security?

As APIs are the backbone of your network or application, API Security is one of the most critical components of web security in the modern era.?

In recent years, organizations have opted for zero-trust models after being breached by entities they trusted. It means no human or computer can access a resource until they're authorized. In addition to authorization, threat monitoring and prevention will remain crucial to the network long after authorization has been completed.?

APIs are subject to a wide range of threats every day, thus choosing the above approach is necessary. A comprehensive cybersecurity strategy that revolves around authentication, authorization, and threat prevention can provide great protection for APIs.

As an example, let's take a look at an image that illustrates how common API usage is in our daily lives, not only in terms of reading the data, but also in terms of writing data.

API Security statistics & economics

• Today on an avg every developer works/modifies/creates on 2.9 API everyday
• And on the same line we see around 69% of the above API used are from the third party which means the every online property has a huge consumption of API from outside the system
• RapidAPI, an API marketplace alone started processing 400B API calls/month since last year, which shows the scalability and usability.

• Around 42% of the API’s are being updated/modified day by day or weekly at least.
• The most interesting result is that around 91% API first company had security attack major or minor, compromised or not compromised, but the % itself shows the value of having right protection enabled for API.?
• Handling and managing API alone looks a significant market which is $13 billion by 2027,

• Around 75% web application are powered by API’s following up by mobile 56%
• Retail & travel is being more open towards this as they have multiple sources to collect data which trend towards 34%.
• Healthcare seems to be more tempting, the reason could be the data source is very centralized and in the last couple of year we have seen the real explosion of healthcare startup.

API Standard Checklist

1. Discovery And Inventory

The API documentation process is a best practice in itself, but it may not be followed consistently by organizations. The API endpoints, parameters, and data types must all be discovered by automated discovery. This section of the API Security Checklist focuses on creating an accurate API inventory to serve a wide variety of IT needs within your organization.

• Identify APIs not just in production environments but also in lower environments
• Ensure that third-party APIs and API dependencies are included
• Implement tags and labels as part of DevOps best practices for APIs and microservices

2. 3D- Document, Design and Development

Having comprehensive documentation is useful for API teams building or integrating APIs. It's also useful for design reviews, security testing, operations, and protection. When it comes to security requirements, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. The OWASP Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS) is an excellent resource that is relevant for all types of applications. When creating the API Security Checklist, ensure API integration and threat modelling are included.

• The OpenAPI Specification (OAS) is one of the most commonly used machine formats
• As a basic testing and protection method, repurpose API schema
• Build secure-by-design APIs
• Frameworks, code, templates, libraries, and so on should be secure
• Inspect the design and code for flaws, especially those that pertain to the business logic of the system
• In addition to checking the security configurations, you should include a security checklist for APIs to ensure there are no misconfigurations.

3. Authentication And Identity and Access Control

It is crucial that you take into consideration both user and machine identities when you are examining API security best practices for authentication and authorization. Externalize all identity stores and access controls. Mediation mechanisms like API gateways, user and machine identity stores, identity management solutions, key management services, public key infrastructure, and secret management are all part of this category.

• Maintain a continuous authentication and authorization process for API consumers?
• Add security extensions to authorization protocols like OAuth2?
• In the implementation of access controls and authentication, do not forget to include both human and machine identities. When installing third party applications and services, do not forget to include them as well.
• Use zero trust principles to ensure users (including privileged users) have access to API resources just-in-time, just-enough. Review privileges frequently and make necessary changes as soon as possible.?
• Even authorized users should not be permitted to make unvalidated requests to public APIs
• Multi-factor authentication should be combined with strong, complex passwords.

4. Assessment and Testing?

Test API implementations for well-known misconfigurations or vulnerabilities using traditional security testing tools, but recognize the limitations of these tools. In addition, scans fail to parse business logic, leaving organizations vulnerable to API abuse.

• Analysis of API code automatically as part of version control and continuous integration/continuous deployment
• Verify API dependencies for vulnerabilities
• Identify exploitable code in runtime by dynamically analyzing deployed APIs

5. Logging and Monitoring

Having logging and monitoring data helps you detect infections, respond to incidents, and protect your applications. It also helps you construct baselines of what should be considered normal so outlier events can be identified quickly.

• Specify all required logging elements for infrastructure, applications, and APIs
• Include API performance and uptime measurements not related to security
• Review anomalies at regular intervals and tune your APIs accordingly

Realtime threat Detection, Mitigation and Protection

Any runtime protection you plan to deploy must contain a dynamic component, one that will be able to continuously learn as it moves along, and that can learn from the experience it has with the environment. The API Security Checklist will be used to identify misconfigurations in API infrastructure as well as behavior anomalies, such as credential stuffing, brute force, and scraping. These behavior anomalies may occur as part of your API Security Checklist.

• Protect your API gateways and APIM with threat protection
• Consider DoS, DDoS, bot attacks, OWASP Top 10 API security risks, etc. Mitigation when protecting APIs
• Go beyond traditional runtime controls which rely on rules to detect API attacks using AI/ML and behavior analysis engines
• Replace traditional signature-based approaches with behavioral, pattern, and heuristic analysis to identify threats proactively

Continued......

Blog Part 2 Link - API Security-A tempting product line-II

Blog Part 3 Link - API Security-A tempting product line-III