Automating API Discovery

API Inventory for full Visibility & Control of Your API Estate

Unmonitored APIs pose a significant risk, with IBM’s latest annual survey stating that data breaches now cost enterprises, on average $4.88 million per breach, to remediate. However, there persists a narrow understanding of what solutions are available to discover and monitor APIs, distorted by much of the noise around zombie and shadow APIs. The majority of enterprise APIs are already documented and known about, and only a small percentage are in fact “unknown” to security teams.

How to Discover your APIs

By integrating with key infrastructural components of the API ecosystem, 42Crunch creates an API inventory that charts a comprehensive picture of your enterprise API estate.

42C_API Discovery_Diagram-V2

Source Code Repositories

Platforms like GitHub and GitLab serve as repositories, cataloging APIs based on various metadata, including API name, version, endpoints, documentation, and usage patterns, making it easier to organize and manage them efficiently. Using 42Crunch you can automate the import of APIs from code repositories into your API security testing and runtime workflows.

Developer Portals 

Internal developer portals enhance the development process by serving as a one stop shop for internal dev teams to access everything they need for software development and operations. Naturally they include APIs, microservices, code repositories and host of other dev-centric services. Implementing the 42Crunch API Audit and API Scan tools inside the IDE gives further oversight of these APIs as part of the overall API lifecycle.

API Testing 

Leverage your QA teams and tools like Postman and SwaggerHub for enhanced API discovery. By feeding functional and integration testing data into the API Discovery process, security teams gain a deeper understanding of API risks. These tools test API paths, methods, and data flows, providing a comprehensive risk profile for each API.

The 42Crunch next-generation API security tooling enables a proactive "security as code" approach by seamlessly integrating design and testing tools directly into IDEs and CI/CD pipelines. With support for the OpenAPI Specification, developers can effortlessly import APIs and Collections from the above tools, make adjustments within their IDEs, and publish directly to the CI/CD pipeline. This ensures that security teams have real-time visibility and centralized governance across all APIs.

API Gateways 

Easily monitor and secure APIs with the 42Crunch integrations into all leading API gateways and portals. Gateways catalog APIs by function, traffic, and metadata, offering a user-friendly, searchable interface for developers. Gateways provide traffic monitoring and centralized dashboards, streamlining the discovery and management process. 42Crunch offers out-of-the-box integrations into several market-leading API Gateway solutions to provide improved, automated and scalable API gateway security.

API Runtime Logs 

API runtime log tools help discover APIs by monitoring application traffic and analyzing data flows between services. These tools catalog APIs, including undocumented ones like "shadow" and "zombie" APIs. If speed is of the essence and APIs are already deemed potentially vulnerable, without having any sight of them, then deploy our runtime schema protection tool, API Protect can be used to identify all APIs other than those permitted by security.

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