Best Practice API Security
API Security Market Landscape
API security breaches pose a significant risk to all organizations, especially as the deployment and consumption of API-based AI applications grows and with the continued shift of organizations to implement an API-first strategy.
Unfortunately, while there is a broad recognition and understanding by security management of the need for API security, there is a mistaken belief that traditional API discovery and behavior monitoring tools alone provide complete API security. This confusion is further compounded by security vendors that have bundled these tools with traditional application security Web application firewalls (WAF) and their Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) platforms, making it harder to understand what is actually being protected.
Below we examine in detail some of these competing technologies and how 42Crunch’s API security-by-design presents enterprises with an optimum approach to solving the challenges.
Anomaly Detection/Behavior Monitoring
Vendors such as Traceable.ai, Salt Security, Noname, and Cequence offer machine learning (ML) and anomaly detection technologies that promise to identify abnormal behavior in API traffic. Behavioral analytics systems are notoriously difficult to install and maintain, require time to establish a baseline of “normal” behavior, time to retrain after API changes, and often suffer from generating false positives and blind spots due the dynamic nature of APIs. In fast-paced, largescale API environments, relying on traffic patterns alone adds noise, delays response, and undermines confidence in automated defenses.
In this paper we advance why a “Secure-by-Design” approach, widely endorsed by global cybersecurity agencies, is proving to be the essential best practice approach to securing APIs.
DAST vs API Contract Testing
In traditional application security, broad test coverage is often achieved by running large suites of generic attack payloads. But in API security testing, relevance is more important than volume, and in fact irrelevant tests often do more harm than good. DAST tools operate without awareness of an API’s structure, data model, security requirements, or intent. Instead, generic security rules come pre-built with the tool, inherently lacking context or relevance to the APIs under test.
By contrast, 42Crunch offers security teams API contract testing, which offers a more accurate, scalable, and effective approach. Learn how contract-based API security testing works, why it’s better suited to today’s API threat landscape, and how it enables more reliable security outcomes with less noise and effort.
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