Top 3 API Security Best Practices

While efforts to modernize security by infusing zero trust, least-privilege access, and authentication/authorization principles have borne fruit, the game has changed. The players in the application game that cheer you on by transacting across your digital properties are no longer users in the traditional sense. Increasingly, those “users” are business logic calls from APIs, which may be from partners or aggregators as much as they are from customers or prospects. The importance of APIs also means they are a much bigger target for attackers.  

Organizations that want to survive must secure their APIs and mitigate unintended and unforeseen risk in a distributed and ever-changing digital fabric. Organizations that want to thrive should concentrate their strategic efforts in a few key areas to create a predictable, scalable, and self-defending API security platform.

Traditional security controls are widely deployed, used by organizations worldwide to protect business secrets and customer data. Companies use encryption-decryption systems to help ensure privacy and prevent data theft by restricting access to sensitive information. Security controls such as rate limiting help businesses prevent denial of service (DoS) attacks and reduce web scraping by letting them limit the number and frequency of requests to normal, expected traffic baselines. In addition, organizations often use a combination of security tools, such as web applications firewalls (WAFs), static code analysis, and dynamic application security testing to mitigate many common threats, such as those in the OWASP Top 10.

Yet, in today’s digital world, traditional security measures aren’t enough. That’s why so many organizations are embracing modern security controls like authentication (AuthN), authorization (AuthZ), and traffic inspection for their distributed applications.

Organizations use multi-factor authentication, public key certificates, biometrics, and other methods to confirm the identity of people and devices and to make sure only legitimate users and trusted machines can access their data. Authorization is simply a matter of granting appropriate permissions to authenticated users, ensuring they can access all the files and data they need to do their work while preventing them from seeing other information they should not be privy to. Traffic inspection enables companies to minimize risks by examining application traffic and identifying unusual activity and potential threats as well as supplying any insights needed for accounting or incident response.

While these controls are widely deployed and well understood by security and risk teams, implementing them across a plethora of digital touch points is a critical challenge.