Modern IT infrastructures function on APIs as they mediate between two disparate systems and applications. They facilitate data exchange between them. So, APIs are highly important in modern IT ecosystems. Securing them becomes critical to the integrity and safety of your IT landscape.
However, common flaws and misconfigurations are a major roadblock to their security. They provide opportunities for attackers to render sensitive data compromised. Fortunately, you can leverage security testing to prevent these scenarios and protect your data.
So, API security testing is a necessary step in protecting APIs that help to defend them from cyberattacks. It helps to uncover weaknesses and glitches in APIs that attackers can exploit to gain unauthorized access to crucial data.
In this article, we have covered the importance and types of API security testing. Keep reading to get the information.
A Brief Introduction to API Security Testing
API security testing provides the tools and methods to protect APIs (internal and external) from cyberattacks. It is a complete process covering aspects like evaluating APIs for security, identifying flaws and misconfigurations, and patching loopholes to defend against cyber risks. In simple words, it is a process that involves steps from identifying security vulnerabilities to remediating them.
Types of API Security Testing
You can test APIs from the point of view of security by following the methods below.
DAST
Dynamic Application Security Testing or simply DAST helps to discover API vulnerabilities at the time of execution in the production. DAST works by performing simulated attacks on an API. It is an effective approach to evaluate APIs for security vulnerabilities because it’s based on the behavior rather than static code. It can help to identify vulnerabilities that occur at runtime. It evaluates an API as per a real-world scenario. Hence, it can help to detect actual vulnerabilities with the lowest zero false positives.
SAST
Static Application Security Testing or simply SAST helps to identify vulnerabilities in the source code. SAST involves analyzing the bytecode, binary, or source code. It is a static analysis method that tests web apps and APIs in the non-running state. It is effective in discovering coding errors, design flaws, and security vulnerabilities. This type of API security testing may not provide accurate results because the rate of false positives is high with SAST. You can automate this with an automated SAST testing tool.
Fuzz Testing
It is also termed fuzzing which is done by supplying malformed or invalid input to identify API flaws and vulnerabilities. Fuzzing is an automated security testing method, where the system behavior is checked for crashes or exceptions. In simple words, it is a type of API testing where unexpected inputs are supplied to check negative responses that could lead to security issues.
Why is API Security Testing Important?
Securing your APIs keeps your data safe and helps you avoid violations of regulations. The following are all important in detail.
Detect Vulnerabilities
Vulnerabilities are a true menace to a system’s security. They are like hidden holes that compromise the security of a system. Finding and fixing these vulnerabilities is crucial for securing APIs. API security testing is a systematic process to identify and fix vulnerabilities. It entails various steps such as scanning APIs, reporting vulnerabilities, and remediation.
It allows you to identify critical vulnerabilities such as OWASP Top 10 API Security Risks and more to protect your data. You can identify vulnerable endpoints and reduce your attack surface with a thorough vulnerability assessment.
Ensuring Compliance
Security loopholes in APIs will not only bring cybersecurity issues, but they will also impact your ability to meet compliance and regulations. Indeed, you can face dire consequences when a data breach occurs like heavy penalties after failing to comply with GDPR.
There are several regulations and compliances that organizations have to meet like PCI DSS, SOC2, and more. These regulations set the standards that developers must follow to create secure and efficient software applications.
Securing Your Digital Landscape
One crucial importance of API testing for security is protecting your entire digital landscape. APIs are used everywhere from cloud-based solutions to conventional server-side infrastructure. The widespread use of APIs put them on the radar of attackers resulting in high risk of security. Indeed, they are susceptible to cyberattacks that can result in hacking, data breaches, and other risks.
Considering all these factors, it is clear that API security is critical for the integrity and confidentiality of your digital landscape. It is an essential cover against cyber risks protecting APIs from hacking and other threats. By ensuring API security, you can get optimal protection for your data and systems within your digital landscape.
What are the Best Practices for API Security?
You can follow the best practices given below to ensure API security.
Implement Encryption
Encryption helps to protect data in transit by scrambling it with a strong encoding algorithm. It offers a secure exchange of data between a client and an API server. APIs become secure because any unauthorized parties will be unable to access the data due to encryption. Even if they do, they will find an illogical jumble of characters including numbers and alphabets.
Quotas and Throttling
Attackers can overwhelm your APIs with excessive requests and cause a system crash that is a DDoS attack. Quotas and throttling define the limit of requests handled per user by the API mitigating such risks. It is an effective measure to protect APIs from DDoS attacks by limiting the number of API requests that a user can make in a certain period.
Authentication with OAuth
Implement the open authorization or OAuth mechanism. OAuth allows applications to obtain access tokens from other applications where users have already authenticated. You can combine it with OpenID Connect to verify the identity of end users through the client. By implementing both these mechanisms of authentication and authorization, you can strengthen the security of your APIs.
Zero-Trust Architecture
It is a kind of security policy that organizations can adopt to prevent unauthorized users from accessing certain resources. In simple words, only users who authenticate for certain data or resources are allowed. In this policy, no user is trusted and always authenticated to access every resource or data.
To Wrap Up
When it comes to protecting APIs and other digital assets, security testing is a vital process. It helps to discover flaws and misconfigurations that you can fix to make your security posture stronger. It will help in protecting API endpoints by understanding how a potential attack may unfold.
