The development of cloud computing architectures has forced businesses to reconsider how they expand their applications. Companies were encouraged to abandon full-stack application deployment via infrastructure such as virtual machines in favor of a microservices strategy based on APIs built of numerous interoperating services.
The market for APIs is growing, and so is the threat landscape. While API gateways play a vital role in API management and API delivery, they provide a variety of core functionality for API security. It might be tempting to adhere to API gateway alone to meet security objectives. However, addressing the emerging risks of APIs requires various new sophisticated techniques outside the scope of conventional API gateways.
What is an API gateway?
In a typical microservices architecture, an API gateway is an instruction and protocol management tool that handles requests from clients and decides which microservices to route them onto to get a response back.
Think of it as a kind of traffic cop or switchboard, ensuring that requests are delivered to the right places so they can be handled properly on their way to getting a response.
And, with microservices, there must be a demand for efficient API gateways. API gateways were discovered by major cloud suppliers to be a straightforward way for businesses to get their cloud services up and running.
API security requires the implementation of strategies and procedures that can help one mitigate the security threats of their API. This includes ways to prevent explicit and implicit management failures, as well as code failures.
To keep the APIs secure, a plan should be in place, which should contain audit standards, change control systems, management processes, access control measures, etc.
While API gateways give developers a more visible security layer for application programming interface (API) calls, there is still room for improvement. If a gateway fails to adapt with its resources, vulnerability management becomes an incredible challenge.
According to Gartner, API misuse will become the most common attack vector by 2022, resulting in data breaches for business online apps.
But why is API gateway security not good enough?
Let us not confuse API gateways with API security, since the latter, with its access control function, is frequently included in API security. Developers ensure that apps run properly and perform what they’re supposed to do, but attackers are the ones who figure out how to transform apps into weapons. According to the OWASP API Top 10 Security whitepaper, API security risks encompass a variety of vulnerabilities that complement regular web application assaults.
Because API support services are now worth millions of dollars, hackers will look for new ways to obtain insecure keys and breach into them. The following are possible main drivers:
- Using a valid API token, sophisticated attacks can successfully target application business logic and data layer weaknesses.
- Because they are built and engineered to target weaknesses that allow API usage, cyber-attacks that obtain mileage from a valid API token to attack an application’s business logic or data layer can be successful.
- The fundamental limitation of API gateways is that they can only monitor endpoints. Nonetheless, it does not completely specify the whole API structure (RESTful API and API interaction methods) of the services it makes accessible for consumption.
In addition to this, three typical issues that may jeopardize API security are:
APIs are treated with contempt The absence of information regarding the entire number of public, partner, private, and composite APIs prohibits security teams from understanding an API’s true exposure and risk.
Developers versus. hackers For getting into APIs at the developer level, hackers employ tools and even more advanced approaches. They can use small errors to map the API, comprehend its structure, and uncover flaws in the code itself.
What does our small business API matter? Smaller businesses always lack the security that larger businesses have and are more vulnerable than larger ones since they cannot provide the essential procedures to adequately secure their data.
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