In today's society, as the field of Internet applications becomes wider and wider, our dependence on application programming interfaces (APIs) is also increasing. Because when we develop applications, APIs can seamlessly, smoothly and invisibly do various tasks behind the scenes, such as fetching the data you request from your own application to another application. They are a very useful and necessary part of our lives.
But like all digital things, APIs are risky because they can easily expose vulnerabilities to cyber attackers. The good news is that there are several steps you can take to secure your API. Therefore, Fire Umbrella Cloud introduces 5 good measures to ensure API security, so as to promote you to improve your API security.
1. Develop a strong security policy
WAAP (Web Application and API Protection) are the industry standard for securing APIs, mainly because: They are easy to deploy at scale and they provide comprehensive security. When it comes time to evaluate WAAP products, make sure they include bot management, WAF (Web Application Firewall), and API and DDoS protection, which can provide a good foundation for your product security strategy. You get comprehensive protection against many types of cyber threats that can strike applications, steal valuable data and shut down your operations at any time.
2. Automated protection of API security is a good way
While rule- and policy-based security checks are an integral part of API development, machine learning and automation need to be incorporated where possible, as it saves time and prevents human error. Machine learning (ML)-based application security is adaptive to automatically detect and respond to attacks against API vulnerabilities. Just make sure to add them via automatic policy generation after deploying new web applications. ML protects APIs against multiple threats, including protocol attacks, parameter tampering, token manipulation, and more.
3. Check your security settings for third parties
In the past 5-10 years, the vast majority of enterprises and organizations have set the goal of digital transformation and the importance of realizing digital transformation, but if they are too eager to achieve this goal and ignore security, it is easy to expose security vulnerabilities , API growth has more of these risks. While security is always a top priority for third-party vendors, including cloud providers, it's always a matter of pinning security on someone else, and it's important to actually understand third-party security yourself. First we need to understand how third parties access your organization's data, this includes you need to have a comprehensive understanding of where all APIs are hosted, who can access them, and what data they can obtain. While there are many API management tools on the market, many of them provide visibility and monitoring without much protection. API gateways provide IP filtering and basic authentication, but cannot provide automatic protection against attack vectors.
4. Let the security team introduce the CI/CD system
Your security team needs to be involved in the application/API development process from the beginning. According to the State of Web Application and API Protection report, 92% of organizations' security staff have limited impact on CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment). Instead of imposing security responsibilities on security teams after API and application development is complete, DevSecOps should be an integral part of the development lifecycle from the start.
5. Assess the relevant key elements of WAAP
The introduction and reliance of DevOps and CI/CD pipelines have successfully enabled organizations to create and deploy applications at high velocity without compromising productivity and agility. At the same time, when evaluating the right WAAP solution for your organization, you should also actively consider the following key elements:
1. Visualization
Make sure the visualization doesn't just stop at the API. The solution needs to include performance metrics and ultimately provide a 360° view into security and performance issues, having a unified management platform monitoring and management dashboards is critical.
2. Elastic expansion
Elasticity is another way of defining scalability of a security solution, which needs to be able to grow and expand to meet your needs. A great way to achieve this is to have tools that allow this, such as automatic learning and advanced options for policy and configuration settings.
3. Security against known and unknown threats
Most solutions should be able to detect new and changed applications in the CI/CD pipeline immediately, you need a solution that can automatically generate and optimize security policies.
4. Unified security for data centers, cloud environments, etc.
Every product architecture is like a fingerprint, no two organizational architectures are exactly alike, which is why the solution you choose must fit the architecture, regardless of your cloud or data center environment, you need to be able to fine-tune the solution to meet your needs.
5. Integrate with existing tools and systems
It is critical that your security solution seamlessly integrates with existing tools and systems so that your security solution can handle the consequences of disrupting applications, release cycles, and productivity.