Your APIs are the digital face of your business. It helps to exchange your business-critical data. Do you know the point where the information is exchanged?
The answer is API Endpoint. A crucial endpoint on API where the data exchange happens. While focusing on API protection, don’t ignore API endpoints.
“Because API endpoints can be accessible to anyone externally that calls the API, a rogue endpoint that returns sensitive information is high risk.” – Forrester analyst Sandy Carielli says.
How to secure your API endpoint? API scanning can help you secure endpoints. It also optimizes it for better reliability and performance.
This article offers insights on API scanning, its benefits, limitations, and how to scan API endpoints.
API scanning is crawling all API definitions to identify potential endpoints. It detects vulnerabilities, gaps, security weaknesses, and misconfigurations that attackers can exploit to orchestrate API attacks.
API endpoints and web apps endpoints are different. Web applications rely mostly on web server endpoints to do the heavy lifting in processing and handling user requests. However, APIs offer data access at a more atomic level. It manages API requests directly, and backend data stories structure the replies.
This means the resulting vulnerabilities are different. Also, the steps on how to scan API endpoints are different too.
You cannot rely on generic scanning tools to identify API vulnerabilities and gaps. Your organization needs API-specific scanning tools. Only API-specific security tools can manage modern-day architectures’ complexity and growing sophistication.
The first step in scanning APIs is defining goals and planning the scanning processes. At this stage, you must define the following:
API definitions are also known as API specifications or description formats. They are language-agnostic baseline guides for machine consumption. By leveraging API definitions, automated tools perform different activities like generating API documentation, monitoring APIs, and testing.
API definitions are key for API scanning and testing. API definitions tell automated tools the following details:
In other words, the definitions help tools better visualize the API. API security scanning tools leverage the API definitions and predefined rules to detect vulnerabilities.
Managed scanning solutions use API definitions to ensure scanners can detect all vulnerabilities. Such solutions are equipped to visualize even complex API structures.
They can unearth shadow, rogue, and zombie APIs. This helps prevent being blindsided by them while keeping the API inventory updated.
Your API scanning tools must perform deep, intelligent, and automated scanning to detect all known and emerging vulnerabilities. It should be backed with the latest threat intelligence, global threat feeds, and past security reports.
You must fine-tune the rules, policies, parameters, and API definitions. It ensures the scanner effectively identifies the latest vulnerabilities.
In addition, the API scanning solution must include automated and manual pen-testing to understand logical and unknown flaws.
Another critical aspect of scanning APIs is false positive management. When false positives are minimal, it helps accelerate the pace and efficacy of remediating vulnerabilities. This is because your developers will not waste their time and efforts on fixing issues that don’t exist.
API scanning, like web scanning, is incomplete without proper reporting and documentation of the findings. The insights the scan reports provide are central to effectively managing security risks.
It helps to augment pen testing. Improves overall security!
Conclusion
API scanning is the first step in API security, not the silver bullet solution to resolving API risks. It needs to be part of a comprehensive API security solution.
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This post was last modified on January 2, 2024 17:25
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