APIs are the access doors to your enterprise assets and the backbone of pretty much any application that has been written in recent years. While most companies apply token-based access to APIs with OpenIDConnect and OAuth, there are still many aspects of security which are not properly covered for APIs such as common injection attacks, keys and certificates secured storage, fine-grain access to resources, non-repudiation, or simply message encryption. Also, security is often a last minute thought in the API development process.
To properly protect those access doors, enterprises need to invest in tools and processes that put security at the heart of APIs development, testing and deployment. You can start by:
- Educating personnel on security risks: everybody should know about the top 10 OWASP risks list and how to address them. OWASP offers countermeasures you can apply to protect your assets. It’s worth noting that Unprotected APIs have recently been added to the OWASP threats list!
- Deploying code analyses tools (static/dynamic) and hook them to the CI/CD pipeline.
- Actively scanning APIs for vulnerabilities. Start with ZAP, an OWASP open source penetration testing tool which also plugs to the CI/CD pipeline.
- Making sure all apps and APIs are tested with security ON as early as possible – Don’t flip the security switch at the last minute and hope that the security teams catch all issues by some miracle.
- Assessing the APIs risk and apply proper security policies, addressing authentication, authorization, data encryption, and auditing.
- Testing deployments with tools such as SSL Labs or securityheaders.io and get the best grade!
- Keeping systems up to date and keep an eye on all security fixes.
At 42Crunch, we are working hard to make security policies much easier to define and apply to your APIs. We will also allow development, security and operations teams to collaborate throughout the API delivery lifecycle, to deliver an infrastructure and security policies optimized by API.
