APIs nowadays have become the go-to choice of developers regarding web and application development. With this increased reliance on APIs comes an even greater need for security measures to protect sensitive data from potential threats. However, implementing effective API security can be daunting, especially with the evolving nature of cyber threats. To help you remain secure, we will explore the top 10 API security best practices in this article.
What is API Security?
To answer what is API security, you will need to understand what APIs are. An API or Application Programming Interface is a set of tools and standards developers use during web and software application development. They provide a standardized way for different applications to interact, exchange data and functionality, and enhance the user experience.
This has led to increased use of API in web and application development as they save time, effort, and cost. However, APIs can also expose sensitive data and functionality to unauthorized access and misuse, making them vulnerable to cyber-attacks. API security aims to prevent such attacks and protect the API against malicious activities.
It involves implementing security measures such as authentication, authorization, encryption, and access controls. Moreover, these measures ensure that only authorized users and applications can access the API and its resources.
You may also like: Top 5 API Services with Features Comparison
Why is API Security Important?
With the rising use of API, it has become crucial to ensure that API security takes the highest priority during software development. Questions like why and how to secure API are important when discussing the importance of API security. These are some reasons that demonstrate why API security is essential:
- Sensitive Data: Since APIs are communicating tools between different software, it becomes highly important that they don’t leak sensitive data like Personal Identifiable Information (PII), financial information, etc. Ensuring that API data is end-to-end encrypted and secured during transmission is crucial to protect against data breaches.
- Unauthorized Access: APIs can access and manipulate data or functionality within an application, making the app data vulnerable. It is essential to ensure that only authorized users and applications can access the API and perform actions.
- API Vulnerabilities: Like any other software tool, APIs are also prone to many cyber-attacks like injection attacks, XXS, and DoS attacks. Protecting APIs against such vulnerabilities is critical to prevent data theft, manipulation, etc.
- Regulations: It is also extremely important that the APIs you use comply with the standard regulations. These regulations ensure and implement many important standards in APIs. For example, GDPR and PCI DSS require APIs to be secure and encrypted to protect against data theft and breach.
- Trust: Building trust between APIs and users is also highly important. APIs are often used by third-party applications to access data or functionality within an application. Ensuring that APIs are secure and reliable builds trust with the users and third-party applications.
Top 10 API Security Best Practices
How can you ensure that the APIs you use remain secure and can protect against cyber-attacks? It is not hard to ensure the security of your APIs. Listed below are 10 API security best practices to help you:
1. Authentication
To start securing API, the first thing you need to do is implement strong authentication measures. Multiple strong and secure authentication measures are available, like OAuth 2.0, JSON Web Tokens (JWTs), OpenID Connect, etc. These mechanisms provide secure methods for authenticating users and applications without revealing sensitive information like passwords.
OAuth 2.0, for example, allows users to grant permission for applications to access specific resources on their behalf. It permits users to use other accounts, such as Facebook, Google, or Apple ID when signing up on different websites.
2. Validation
After authentication in a secure API comes validation. It is the process of ensuring that the input by a party meets the criteria set by you. In simple words, it means any input should be of the correct format, length, and composition as allowed. Validation has two types, input validation, and output validation. The input validation ensures there is no wrong input from users.
While the output validation ensures that the response has the correct format and meets the criteria. With input validation, you can prevent attacks like DoS, XSS, SQL injection, etc. On the other hand, output validation protects against data leaks and unintentional exposure of sensitive info.
3. Authorization
Authorization is another important cornerstone of API security. It basically deals with what permission users have and how they can use it. Moreover, it goes hand in hand with authentication, with both commonly used in the same sense. In simple words, after a user has the authentication and validation, he should only have access to data that their role defines.
Moreover, users should not be able to access data that doesn’t concern them. There are different ways you can implement authorization in APIs. You can implement access control, use granular permissions, enforce the least privilege principle, and many similar techniques to manage it.
4. Encryption
Nowadays, encryption has almost become the basic requirement for any software, application, API, or anything which deals with user data. Rising cybercrime and fears of identity theft have made users extremely conscious of their privacy and data security.
Thus, you should implement highly advanced encryption algorithms like AES-256 and two-way TLS. Other improvements regarding encryption considered API security best practices include end-to-end encryption, secure key management, encryption validation, etc.
5. Access Control
When giving others access to the API, always clearly define everyone’s role and access. There are multiple ways you can implement access control regarding API access. Moreover, you can implement a centralized access control system to manage access to the API using Identity and Access Management (IAM) system.
The other two popular access control mechanisms used in securing API are Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC). Similarly, you can also use Access Control Lists (ACLs) to manage resources or actions within the API.
6. Logging and Monitoring
One of the most important aspects of a secure API is the implementation of logging and monitoring. Both of these are essential for detecting and responding to security incidents. When it comes to the logs, you should store them in a secure place, and only a few authorized people should have access to them.
Regularly reviewing logs helps identify any suspicious activity or security incidents. Monitoring your API for unusual traffic patterns, activity, or known attack signatures can help identify and prevent attacks.
7. Implement Rate Limiting
Denial of Service or DoS attacks are the most common attacks cyber criminals use to attack services like API. That’s it is always recommended that you limit the number of possible requests in a specific period of time. You can limit the request per IP address or API key, whichever suits your API security needs.
Rate-limiting controls can help prevent attackers from sending too many requests to your API, thus avoiding DoS attacks. When implementing rate-limiting controls, it is essential to strike a balance between preventing DoS attacks and ensuring that legitimate users can access the API.
8. Always Use HTTPS
The must-adopted API security best practice is always using the HTTPS protocol when transmitting data between API and client servers. Using HTTPS for API communications provides several benefits. First and most important is that it encrypts the data, which makes it harder for malicious actors to hack your data.
Doing this not only prevents man-in-the-middle attacks but also prevents eavesdropping, tampering, and session hijacking. Moreover, the data transmission happens as plain text if you use HTTP protocol for data transfer between API and server. As a result, it is more prone to getting attacked and successfully hacked by cybercriminals.
9. Regular Vulnerability Tests
Regularly performing vulnerability assessments is an important part of securing API. It involves regularly testing an API for vulnerabilities and weaknesses using vulnerability assessments. These assessments are a systematic approach to identifying and assessing vulnerabilities in an API.
They involve analyzing the API’s configuration, code, and network infrastructure to identify potential vulnerabilities. It tests for weak points such as weak authentication mechanisms, injection flaws, or sensitive data exposure. Once vulnerabilities have been identified, developers can prioritize and remediate them.
10. Secure Coding
Lastly, an important way to secure API is to use secure coding practices while developing an API. It will significantly minimize the risk of vulnerabilities and security issues. These practices include using secure coding libraries and properly validating and sanitizing input data. Moreover, you also minimize the use of third-party libraries and follow secure coding patterns.
You can follow secure coding guidelines and frameworks like OWASP Secure Coding Practices. This framework provides guidelines for secure coding practices, including input validation, authentication, and access control.
ZEGOCLOUD Secure API to Build Real-time Communication App
Are you developing a real-time communication app and looking for secure APIs? ZEGOCLOUD offers highly secure APIs that enable developers to build real-time communication applications easily. With these APIs, users can enjoy reliable and secure communication without worrying about data breaches or unauthorized access. It uses highly advanced end-to-end encryption algorithms, ensuring user privacy is never at risk.
The ZEGOCLOUD APIs strictly adhere to the API security best practices and ensure you get a state-of-the-art product. These APIs are secure, highly customizable, and easy to integrate. ZEGOCLOUD offers extensive and detailed documentation, video tutorials, and comprehensive FAQs to ensure you don’t face any problems.
Prominent Main Features and Benefits of ZEGOCLOUD APIs
It offers numerous features across its APIs, ensuring you get the best real-time communication app. Some of the fantastic features of ZEGOCLOUD APIs are the following:
- High-Quality Video Calls: If you want to ensure that your app offers high-quality and lag-free video calling features, using ZEGOCLOUD Video Call API is the best choice. It provides unparalleled video quality, low latency, and high reliability, along with features like virtual background, face beautification, etc.
- Real-Time Voice Calls: To get crystal-clear audio quality and seamless integration into your app for voice calls, you should go for ZEGOCLOUD Voice Call API. With it, you get audio quality of 48KHz at ultra-low latency of 300ms. Moreover, you also get 10000 free minutes monthly.
- World Class In-App Chat: The ZEGOCLOUD In-app Chat API supports rich media messaging, file sharing, offline messages, and other advanced features that enhance the overall user experience. It is also fully compliant with GDPR and can hand billions of messages at any given time.
- Interactive Live Streaming: When looking for live streaming API with low latency, high reliability, and advanced security features, ZEGOCLOUD Live Streaming API is the answer. It also supports various advanced features, including real-time analytics, virtual gifts, live interaction, and many more.
Conclusion
In conclusion, API security is a critical concern for organizations or businesses of all sizes. However, by following the API security best practices given in this article, you can make your API secure and reliable. When it comes to choosing a secure API provider, ZEGOCLOUD is the industry standard. It offers a range of powerful and secure APIs designed to enhance real-time communication experiences.
Talk to Expert
Learn more about our solutions and get your question answered.
