API use is through the roof, which makes it both essential to internet use and a prime target for attack. If your organization owns or manages an API, it’s imperative that you are effectively protecting it from malicious actors who may want to use its vulnerabilities to find a way into your network.
To prevent this, adequate API protection is essential. A common preventative measure for security incidents is rate limiting, which is a strong first step. However, other tools will be needed to effectively protect your API and secure the data it contains.
The Role of Rate Limiting in API Security
Because APIs work with many different applications and are always web-facing, it can be challenging to protect them from the many threats out on the interwebs. There are, however, some effective security tools. For example, rate limiting is an important part of API security. When you implement rate limiting, you are restricting the resources that people (or bots) are able to use.
When large amounts of traffic descend upon an API, the resource utilization and number of open requests can overwhelm it, causing a shutdown or crash. This means that access is denied, which can create problems for your organization as your customers will become frustrated. The same thing happens when excessive bot traffic hogs all of your resources.
Automated attacks like credential stuffing and DDoS utilize enough resources to take down your API. Credential stuffing attacks use lists of credentials, likely obtained from a data breach or the dark web, to attempt to break into user accounts.
During this time, multiple, repeated login requests are made. While a single login doesn’t use many system resources, the spamming caused by this type of attack can significantly slow down your API. It’s a fair bet that the rest of your legitimate traffic will be unhappy about the slow speeds. DDoS attacks will block traffic entirely by submitting large numbers of requests.
Both types of attacks can be prevented with rate limiting, however. When you implement rate limiting, you prevent any one user from submitting enough requests to take down the API. This can be challenging for DDoS attacks as they tend to use bots from multiple sources, but this can be successfully addressed with advanced security tools.
API Security Beyond Rate Limiting
Rate limiting is not the only tool that can help secure your API. You should also implement:
- Data encryption and tokenization.Encrypting data limits the number of people who can view your personal information. Tokenization is similar, replacing your data with an unrelated series of letters and numbers. This protects your data during transmission between the API and its final destination.
- Authentication and authorization. Credential stuffing attacks take advantage of insufficient authentication protocols. To prevent them, implement multi-factor authentication. This ensures that the legitimate user must approve a login attempt, preventing illegitimate users from accessing accounts that don’t belong to them.
- Monitoring and logging. Monitoring and logging activity around and within your API is essential to understand traffic patterns and begin detecting pending attacks. Activity logs can help your tools more accurately pinpoint when there are signs of malicious traffic.
- Injection attack prevention. Tools that enforce access control and perform input validation can minimize your risk of malicious code being injected into your API.
- WAF. A web application firewall augments your security by detecting malicious traffic before it reaches your API. It blocks the traffic, which is one of the ways to prevent the botnets involved in DDoS attacks from reaching their targets.
When you’re aiming to secure your APIs, make sure your security measures are preventing unauthorized access to the API and that the API is behaving as expected consistently. Anomalies are the first sign of an attack, and blocking them right away will save you a lot of headaches in the end.
Ensuring API Security
Using things like rate limiting and input validation will decrease the likelihood of successful attacks on your API down the road. Encrypt data to limit what attackers can see, and be sure you’re using monitoring tools to check for suspicious activity.
APIs connect web traffic to applications, which makes them a popular attack vector. Without adequate security, attackers can infiltrate your security environment and compromise consumer data. If they are able to do this, you risk compliance violations, data theft or loss, and loss of customer trust.
Your API’s uptime is essential for business continuity. If something like a DDoS attack blocks legitimate users from accessing the API, those users are likely to start looking at your competitors. Additionally, because APIs are so connected, a compromised API provides attackers with a gateway to your systems. Once inside, an attacker may be able to give himself administrative credentials or begin looking for other weaknesses to exploit.
No good can come of weak API security, but by implementing tools like rate limiting, you can control the amount of system resources used. While this isn’t a complete security system on its own, rate limiting is a crucial start. With other tools like automated monitoring, WAFs, and strong authentication protocols, you can further improve your security, setting your organization up for long-term success.
