I am working on a project where we’re integrating several APIs…, and I am looking for some advice on best practices for securing them. I have read a bit about common techniques like API keys and OAuth, but I would love to hear more about how you handle security in your projects.
Specifically, I am interested in ::-
How do you manage API keys securely: ??
Are there any tools or practices you use to monitor for potential vulnerabilities: ??
What are your thoughts on using rate limiting and IP whitelisting: ??
I am also curious if there are any common pitfalls I should avoid when setting up API security. I have also read this https://42crunch.com/token-management-best-practices-cissp/ this helped me a lot but now I am looking for more help about this.
Thanks in advance for any insights or recommendations…!
When you say you’re integrating several APIs, does it mean you are consuming someone else’s APIs while building an application, or that you’re implementing the APIs and integrating them into a scenario or call chain of some sort?
On API security practices, I can share some insights from what we see in our research for the newsletter APISecurity.io, where we look at the latest API vulnerabilities and their root causes:
A very common pitfall is lack of API input and output validation. We see it crop up every week as a major vulnerability in industry, and it’s exploited in APIs often through SQL injection attacks, path traversal attacks, and excessive data exposure.
This webinar does a deep-dive on some recent real world API vulnerabilities where the root cause involved APIs lacking data validation.
The key to avoiding these is to clearly define what data is expected into and out from your API endpoints at runtime, and then ensuring your API developers validate all runtime traffic to only accept expected data, and reject anything else by default.
That will help you remove a bunch of very common vulnerabilities that many API teams have trouble with.
