Highlights:

  • To reduce false positives while managing effective protection, API security solutions must frequently change their security policies as per the need.
  • Machine learning is vital for API security solutions to scan and fix the sophisticated threats caused by malicious bots.

The rising popularity of APIs has resulted in the expansion of API gateway solutions. While some gateways provide basic signature-based protection, it’s essential to know that this may not provide overall security.

An API gateway behaves as a hub for all API requests, controlling communication between client devices and backend services.

Its major function is to guarantee reliable API processing. Moreover, API gateways manage tasks such as:

  • Access control
  • Protocol conversion
  • Resource scaling

Also, many offer basic security features such as authentication, authorization, encryption, and rate limiting.

Can API Gateways Fully Protect Against API Attacks?

While API gateways offer essential functionalities like client authentication and authorization, they are not crafted to provide strong, comprehensive security against modern API threats. Conventional signature-based rules and rate-limiting, often implemented within API gateways, are not effective against new-age sophisticated attackers who can easily avoid these measures.

The State of API Security in Q1, 2023 of SALT LABS says a significant rise in API security incidents, with attack traffic growing at a much faster pace than overall API traffic. This shows the need for modern security solutions. The OWASP API Security Top 10 shows various attack vectors, such as malicious bots and internal API abuse, that the limited security API gateway capabilities cannot adequately tackle.

For example, malicious bots can launch a range of attacks, such as account takeover and application DDoS, by taking advantage of vulnerabilities in APIs. While individual API calls may look legitimate, the sequence and style of these calls can unveil malicious intent.

Moreover, internal APIs, which facilitate communication between application components, are frequently overlooked by API gateways. Safeguarding these east-west interactions needs a more streamlined and all-inclusive approach.

To efficiently protect APIs against modern threats, enterprises need to start inserting advanced API security solutions that go ahead of the basic API gateway capabilities. These solutions can furnish modern features such as:

  • Behavioral analytics
  • Machine learning
  • Threat intelligence

These features help detect and mitigate sophisticated attacks in the modern age.

Rethinking API Protection: Security Beyond the Gateway

Today, we need all-rounder API protection solutions to be integrated into a wider application security strategy. It should safeguard the application and API as well as the underlying infrastructure.

Efficient API protection starts with a deep understanding of the API attack surface. A customized security policy is then developed to identify and block a wide range of modern API threats.

Lastly, modern machine learning algorithms can automate the discovery of active APIs, their structure, parameters, and data types. This information can be used to generate accurate security policies directly for all identified APIs.

Machine Learning-powered API Security: No Space for Friction

To reduce false positives while controlling effective protection, an API security needs to optimize its API security policies constantly.

Machine learning can automate this process, recommending and employing policy adjustments to lessen false positives.

This approach guarantees cutting-edge API protection while making API management and security more effective and simplified.

Advanced Bot Detection for API Security

An effective API security solution should incorporate machine learning to detect malicious bot activities targeting APIs. This includes threats like account takeover, content scraping, data harvesting, and fraud.

Bot detection is based on these factors:

  • API flow control: Protecting against malicious bot access.
  • API client SDK: Identifying individual machines using unique fingerprints.
  • Invocation context analysis: Analyzing web and mobile API interactions.
  • Authentication flow analysis: Protecting against account takeover attempts, credential stuffing, and token cracking.

Secure APIs, Protect Your Business: Essential Features

The following sections provide a detailed overview of the features of modern API security. It offers the following features:

  1. Abuse detection

Abuse detection identifies security incidents affecting your APIs. A security incident consists of related security events detected through Google’s machine-learning-based detection rules. These rules identify patterns indicative of malicious activity, such as API scraping and anomalies. You can then implement security actions to mitigate these threats.

  1. Security reports

Security reports provide detailed insights into potential threats targeting your APIs. For instance, you can generate reports showing the number of malicious requests by different criteria, such as the country of origin. These reports are accessible through the Apigee UI or API.

  1. Risk assessment

Risk assessment helps pinpoint APIs that do not comply with security standards. It regularly evaluates your API configurations and assigns security scores. If a low score reveals a configuration issue, advanced API security offers recommendations to fix it.

  1. Security actions

Security actions allow you to determine how Apigee manages detected traffic based on abuse detection data. For example, you can set a security action to block requests from an IP address identified as a source of abuse.

  1. Security alerts

You can configure security alerts to notify you when advanced API security detects security-related events, such as changes in security scores or new security incidents.

API Gateway: Where it Lags?

In the cybersecurity domain, depending on API documentation alone is riskier. API gateways are useful, but they have their limitations.

When services are unveiled, they can unknowingly expose deprecated APIs and develop shadow APIs, introducing new attack surfaces. This is where a self-sufficient security layer becomes vital, furnishing customizable protection customized to the unique API definitions.

Even though API gateways can execute “API discovery,” their major function is confined to flexibly linking API definitions within the gateway to the growing services on the server side.

They do safeguard against unauthorized API calls, but this alone is not sufficient for all-inclusive security. Specifically, when handling zero-day attacks, a reliance on a negative security model is not satisfactory. Efficient protection needs a mix of both negative and positive security models, together with a committed vulnerability research team that can quickly deploy defenses against upcoming threats, like the Log4j vulnerability.

Nevertheless, API gateways frequently fall short in modern threat detection. Solutions that verify every API request, like payloads and HTTP headers, are significant in pinpointing abnormal behavior patterns. By implementing intent analysis, these solutions can detect the true intent behind an API request, efficiently removing malicious API calls. This layered security approach fills the gaps where API gateways alone may fall behind, guaranteeing robust protection in the complex API environment.

At the End

API gateway solutions play a vital role in handling and securing API traffic, as they offer essential features such as:

  • Access control
  • Protocol conversion
  • Basic security measures

Nonetheless, as API threats are constantly growing, no doubt depending on API gateways for protection will not help. Gateways, while efficient in their main functions, frequently fall behind in detecting and tackling advanced and experienced attacks.

To manage these gaps, a full-fledged API security strategy is vital—one that goes after the capabilities of API gateways. This considers deploying modern security solutions such as:

It assists in detecting and responding to threats in real time. These tools can analyze every API request, identify malicious patterns, and adjust security policies dynamically, providing a robust defense against zero-day vulnerabilities and other emerging threats.

Finally, while API gateways are an essential element of API lifecycle management, they should be supplemented with new-age, devoted security solutions to ensure all-rounder protection across the entire API ecosystem.