Securing Your APIs with the Right API Management Solution

• In other words, this aligns with “practicing the principle of least privilege”. Even though a set of users can access the same API, only administrators should be able to make changes while non-administrators have “read-only” access. This is achieved using scopes.

Support Integration with Other Identity Providers

• Based on the use case, it’s important to have the ability to be free from vendor lock-in for identity providers in the API ecosystem. In other words, the identity provider (IDP) must be chosen based on the actual requirements, types of users, and, in some cases, legal aspects.

Detect and Prevent Fraudulent Access

• Even though a strong authentication/authorization is implemented, if the keys and tokens have been stolen by an attacker (from a legitimate user), the system “thinks” it’s the same legitimate user. This is where anomaly detection becomes a lifesaver.

Monitor, Trace, and Notify in Real-time

• Whenever there is a security breach or a misused token, the relevant parties must be informed in real-time. Also, having proper tracking logs will be helpful for identifying the security issue’s root cause.

Validate all Calls

• Sometimes, even legitimate users may unintentionally send potentially harmful requests to the system. The solution must be able to protect APIs and backends from these scenarios by employing proper request/response validations.

It takes a considerable amount of time and effort for an organization to implement all these security measures. Also, these should be continuously updated and maintained to ensure the safety of the API ecosystem, which can amount to a significant cost and effort burden. This is where the right API management solution becomes a lifesaver.

7 Areas you Shouldn’t Ignore When Selecting a Secure API Management Solution

The following aspects should be considered when choosing an API management solution for an organization. At the end of the day, the implementation layer accounts for a significant part of the security mechanism.

Here are 7 aspects to look at when evaluating an API management platform that offers first-class API security.

1. Developer Friendliness

API developers and system engineers play a key role in designing and implementing the final API management system. To make this process productive, the API management solution should be developer-friendly so that developers have the resources to rapidly configure, test, and deploy the security controls to the chosen system.

2. Supporting Modern Protocols

Since APIs have been adopted by many heterogeneous applications, there is a continuous need to support modern technologies and protocols such as Async APIs and GraphQL. This ensures that the system has the latest fixes, updates, and features, and can support multiple applications simultaneously.

3. Transport Layer Security

Transport layer security (TLS) is a pivotal technical aspect of a secure API management platform. This ensures the communications and information exchanged between the client and the API stay encrypted so that potential man-in-the-middle attacks can be prevented.

4. Application and User-level Security

In an API ecosystem, there might be hundreds of applications and users. End-to-end security or message-level security can be considered application-level security. User-level security restricts data or services on a need-to-know basis, mitigating the risk of a data breach. Both must be considered when evaluating API management systems.

5. Payload (or Content) Inspection

When exposing an API to a consumer, the API management layer must be able to inspect the payload sent and look for any malicious content before the payload is processed by the actual service to avoid intentional or unintentional misuse.

6. Using Advanced AI Algorithms

With sophisticated security attacks on APIs, AI-based security mechanisms often save a lot of time and effort when monitoring the security of the API ecosystem. When selling an API management solution, the support for AI-based security must be considered.

7. Extendability

There may be situations where users aren’t showing interest in leveraging in-built security capabilities. In such cases, there should be a way to plug an external IDP.

Conclusion

This post summarized the aspects enterprises need to address when creating a fully-secured API management solution. Keeping these in mind will help you to develop an API ecosystem that is trusted by your customers.

To learn more about today’s API security challenges and how to address them properly, we encourage you to read this article. Moreover, the Total Economic Impact Study by Forrester Consulting Analysts will give you detailed information about how to quickly pursue digital initiatives to achieve sustained growth, enhanced innovation, and first-class API security.