API Security

Today the majority of applications depend on APIs to communicate from their back-end infrastructure and other resources.

As APIs are generally in contact with critical infrastructure and can potentially reveal sensitive information, makes APIs an attractive target for attackers.

So securing API infrastructure for uniform and secure communication is the need of the hour.

Here’s how we can secure APIs.

• Make sure the communication between machines is secure and end-to-end encrypted.
• Use of API keys to authenticate the device from where the call is being made
• Use of authorization token to verify whether a user is authorized to make a request.
• Use the least privilege principle, where more privilege can be given if required and revoked when there is no use.
• Use of an API gateway, as a properly configured gateway can help organizations analyze, control, and authenticate traffic.

How to secure API calls?

• Avoid assigning general numeric IDs or incremental IDs to your users. It is easy for an attacker to guess the ID or launch a brute force attack against the ID parameter and access details of others for which they are not authenticated.
• Instead of numeric values, use universally unique identifiers to identify resources.
• Limit the number of requests made by a specific origin in a time frame. Failing to do this can lead to a DoS (Denial of Service) attack as the server will try to respond to each request and may run out of resources in no time.
• Avoid exposing information while requesting a URL or in another form and limit information to as required in response. Ensure that the information is encrypted when in transit and rest.
• HTTP Methods like GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE should be implemented to API’s endpoints, and must be in relation to users’ actions, like when a user requests to delete it should delete something and if the method doesn’t match the request type, a generic error should be delivered like ERROR 405.
• Implementation of an API gateway can help in uniform and great performance and in managing API traffic.

How to secure the API gateway?

API gateways play an important role in securing API as they are solely responsible for rerouting APIs.

Aggregating data from many resources, managing multiple endpoints to manage traffic and continuity, and are capable of detecting attacks.

• API gateways are responsible for authentication hence a secure authentication mechanism is set up using API key, and auth tokens.
• Sanitize the user input to prevent injection and XSS-like attacks.
• A malformed input can mess with the gateway to get an unintended result. Along with it that limits the size of the body, if a message size is in MBs and we are not supposed to receive that, then don’t mind filtering them out.
• Validate the content type if it isn’t relevant then give a generic error like ERROR 406.
• Check for the version, make sure it is up-to-date, and avoid running unnecessary services.
• Remove development leftovers like debug mode, unused components, features, and documents.

How to secure API keys?

• Using a secure method to generate a key should be unpredictable and unique like jwt secret to make the brute-force unrealistic and the mode of transmitting the key should be encrypted/secure.
• Using an independent key for different services will limit the scope of the key.
• Implementing a max age for a key can vary from an hour, week to month as per the use and authority.
• Implementation of a secure mechanism to regenerate the API key, and disable the previous key when the user requests for new.
• Revoke keys that are no longer in use.

So far we have discussed how we can secure our API overall structure, In upcoming blogs we shall discuss how we can test our API security.

Conclusion

Enormous growth is seen in the use of API as well as attacks on them over a while.

Securing APIs aims to implement secure authentication and authorization mechanisms based on user privileges, to secure sensitive information and individual identity.

And to provide an unhindered and continuous secure service.

If you are looking for a security audit service, you can check out the Webkul basic security module.

Check out this Magento 2-based eCommerce store security extension which can also be customized.

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