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Posted by: Hasan Sameer
May 5, 2023
API Security refers to all the tools, techniques, and processes involved in protecting your APIs from malicious activities. A lot of organizations out there are actively using APIs. It has become a fundamental part of their IT infrastructure and enables access to sensitive software functions and data. This is primarily the reason why hackers are maliciously targeting APIs on such a large scale. Securing APIs is a key aspect of modern application security. There are various potential vulnerabilities like broken authentication and authorization, lack of rate limiting, and code injection that makes them susceptible to a wide array of attacks. Therefore, it is vitally important to test and secure all the endpoints of your API to ensure it is safe from all kinds of prevailing threats.
increase in API attacks has been registered during the last year.
of organizations experienced at least one malicious incident against their API security.
of respondents in a survey found lacking an API security strategy.
of IT security professionals believe that security testing api should be considered a priority.
Security testing is recommended for all aspects of the IT infrastructure to ensure optimum security. APIs play an important role in allowing different software systems to communicate with each other. It involves a heavy data transaction which makes it a lucrative target for attackers.
Comprehensive security testing will help to fortify the API security posture in the following ways:
As we have already discussed, APIs might contain several potential vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities open them up against malicious activities like SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and cross-site request forgery (CSRF). Comprehensive security testing can help you uncover these vulnerabilities and determine the impact of their exploitation. Hence, you can address these vulnerabilities and remediate them before hackers exploit them. Eventually, this makes your API security stronger and more resilient against common attack vectors.
Broken authentication and authorization are common propositions in terms of API security. This might lead to unauthorized access to your applications and crucial data. API pen testing security processes can also test authentication and authorization mechanisms. The process involves checking whether API needs or has authentication protocols. If it has, then whether the authentication mechanism is secure. The security testing process also enforces proper authorization for each request within the API. It will make sure that only authorized users can access sensitive data.
The whole game of APIs is based on data. There is a whole lot of data transaction involved between APIs and various external sources. So, it is important to make sure that this data is safe and valid. Comprehensive security testing api is helpful in identifying irregularities and vulnerabilities in data validation. It takes care of proper vetting of input and output data validation. Testing input data validation is necessary to avoid injection attacks. And output validation can prevent data leakage.
Encryption makes sure that the sensitive data transmitted through APIs is secure. Even if this encrypted data is intercepted by hackers, they won’t be able to crack it without the encryption key. Comprehensive testing can identify any weaknesses in the implementation of encryption mechanisms. It will also help you implement strong encryption algorithms in your APIs. Plus, it ensures that encryption keys are adequately managed.
APIs mechanisms and operations are highly susceptible to errors. Comprehensive testing can check whether the API is handling those errors properly. The process involves testing if the API provides appropriate error messages to the users. Plus, it also ensures that no sensitive information is revealed in the error messages. Frequent testing will also eliminate the issues that might lead to crashing the API or becoming unresponsive in the event of an error.
Attackers can make attempts to overload the API with requests, causing a denial of service (DoS) attack. This is one of the common ways hackers target APIs. Comprehensive security testing api will help you implement rate limiting to the APIs to prevent such attacks.
