API security is often overlooked in favor of ensuring maximum functionality between applications. However, failure to protect your API and all its endpoints can have disastrous consequences for brands and developers alike.
This is everything you need to know about API security solutions, along with the most common vulnerabilities developers should be aware of within their applications.
The answer is simple—APIs are vulnerable by nature and give hackers a potential route to intercept your data and commit a security breach while your data is in transit. By gaining access to your API, an enterprising hacker could also gain access to your application at large, as well as the user data it stores.
As a result, you could end up having a serious security breach on your hands if you don’t constantly monitor and protect your API and the data it transfers. In turn, you could end up paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in settlements, fines, and cleanup fees after your application is compromised.
You may think it can’t happen to you—so have countless other applications using APIs to communicate with other apps. However, as these other applications have learned the hard way, API-based security breaches can be extremely costly, and your data is never more vulnerable than while it’s in transit.
Web APIs are inherently vulnerable by nature, which is why it’s necessary to have a sophisticated API security program in place. These are some of the most common API security threats that can compromise your entire system and potentially harm your organization and bottom line.
One of the notable vulnerabilities APIs have is that they tend to expose endpoints that handle object identifiers. Every one of these endpoints is another potential vector for an API breach.
This is partially why authorization checks, potentially including multi-factor authentication (MFA), should be a requirement for any operation using your data sources and endpoints.
Some developers skip authentication measures, especially on APIs that are only intended for internal or private use. However, skipping these measures practically invites attackers to exploit these flaws to pose as innocent users or compromise your authentication tokens from within.
Because this compromises the system’s ability to identify who is using it, it compromises your API’s security overall.
This vulnerability is technically two security weaknesses in one. It combines excessive data exposure and mass assignment. Both of these issues stem from improper authorization validation at the object property level. In turn, it allows an attacker to manipulate the data within for their own nefarious purposes and potentially compromise identifying data.
By nature, API calls use resources such as your network’s bandwidth, CPU, memory, and storage, along with other forms of validation through email or SMS codes. This ultimately culminates in a massive load of resource consumption.
While this may not seem like an issue on its own, it can make it harder to spot a possible denial of service attack in progress. Minimizing API resource use wherever possible improves your security posture so you can respond to these types of attacks more effectively.
APIs that offer unrestricted access to sensitive business flows are more likely to expose user data, especially if they don’t compensate for how this functionality could compromise user data. While automation is a convenient feature, relying too heavily upon automated business flows, such as purchasing tickets to an event, can be costly.
This risk doesn’t necessarily stem from bugs in the implementation process, either—it could be the result of your developers taking shortcuts to make the application work more seamlessly.
SSRF refers to what happens when an API acquires remote resources without validating the user’s input. When an attacker uses it, they can force the application to send a specialized request to an unexpected destination.
Don’t think your system is safe from these attacks just because you have a firewall or VPN, either. Attackers can still create requests for unexpected and unsecured destinations disguised as legitimate ones. This is why implementing proper validation measures is essential.
Compared to traditional, self-contained website applications, APIs haven the tendency to expose multiple endpoints. While this means that proper documentation is invaluable to keeping your API and app safe, it also means it’s important to mitigate the use of deprecated versions of your API and protect exposed endpoints that may be subject to unauthorized debugging.
As with open-source code, developers tend to trust the data they receive from third-party APIs more than they trust user input. While this might seem like it’ll result in cleaner code overall, it often means these developers end up relying upon weaker security standards that leave their API at risk.
Attackers tend to use third-party integrations as a supply chain attack because these integrations are a softer target than trying to compromise the API directly. That’s why it’s essential to take security measures with your third-party API integrations as much as you would with any other part of your stack.
Protecting your API takes a multifaceted approach, especially if your API connects multiple programs. These are the API security best practices we recommend following as a baseline to keep every connected application safe.
This is one of the most basic steps you can take to protect your API, but it’s also one of the most important. Since user accounts are one of the most common inroads attackers use to gain access to your application, it’s important to implement role-based access control (RBAC) and authentication measures.
Encouraging or requiring users to have MFA on their accounts or using it as a checkpoint when they want to access the API can add another layer of security to your entire system and keep your users safe.
Keeping with DevSecOps best practices, you should include end-to-end data encryption whenever possible. Encrypting data in transit—when it’s most vulnerable—protects it from being intercepted by attackers in a middle-man attack.
Your API should protect the data it transmits just as much as your application itself. Implementing this form of verification ensures that every piece of data is accurate and correctly formatted so no malicious code can infiltrate your API or its endpoints. It also makes breaking into your application with invalid data more challenging for attackers.
As mentioned, APIs consume tons of data compared to your application’s standard operations. In addition to only using the most essential scripts and data that your API needs, you can also limit opportunities for a denial of service attack by limiting the amount of API calls your systems make between each other.
Not only does this limit your data consumption so it’s easier to detect a denial of service attack in progress, but it also reduces the opportunities an attacker has to intercept your data while it’s in transit.
Logging every type of API activity creates a paper trail. In turn, you’ll be able to more easily monitor the types of calls your API makes and track suspicious activity so you can make a measured response.
Activity logging and monitoring also allow you to continuously update your API’s security posture. This allows you to take a more proactive approach to security for both your API and your application as a whole.
Implementing versioning makes it easier to transition between different updates to your API without potentially compromising your data. This also includes having your team implement a timeline for retiring deprecated versions and maintaining compatibility with every application your API touches.
Only sharing the most relevant information through your API during transactions or calls is essential for protecting both your application and the one with which it’s communicating. Taking this step reduces the amount of sensitive data that an attacker could expose and reduces the size of your attack vector.
API gateways serve as a central point for your API and every application it’s connected to. Using them makes it easier to implement authorization policies and control access to API resources so only designated users can access its endpoints.
Most of the top API gateways enable key management, encryption protocols, rate limiting, and authorization tools. By design, they also typically offer logging and monitoring capabilities so your team always knows what the latest activity is and can receive notifications if the system detects unusual situations, often in real time.
Code obfuscation tools can make it more challenging for attackers to understand the code at both ends of your API. In the event that an attacker gains access to your application through the API, obfuscating your code makes it more challenging for them to navigate your application’s code and get access to the most sensitive data in the application.
However, the right code obfuscation tools implement a digital version of the Swiss cheese model by implementing multiple layers of protection that can confuse even the most experienced hacker and render their decompiling tools useless.
PreEmptive’s desktop and mobile application protection programs implement multiple layers of code obfuscation and encryption. This protects your API from all types of threats, ranging from unauthorized attempts at debugging to reverse engineering attacks. It also protects your user data and your brand from becoming collateral damage.
See for yourself how PreEmptive’s suite of code obfuscation tools can protect every part of your application, including your API. Request a free trial today to see how PreEmptive can protect your desktop and mobile apps.