APIs have emerged as the cement of the contemporary application. APIs are at the heart of the movement of data, and the interaction of systems, whether in the form of mobile apps and web frontends or microservices and third-party integrations. However, along with this omnipresence there is exposure. Malicious actors will usually start with APIs to exploit low-security authentication, rate-limit bypass, and malicious payload injection. This article will examine some of the most important concepts that developers should use to create secure APIs; namely authentication, rate limiting, and input validation.
Authentication: Controlling Access at the Door
Authentication defines who can access your API and improper authentication is one of the most frequent reasons of data leakage. Although internal API use cases continue to use static API keys, newer systems are using tokens to provide more granular and scalable control, e.g. JWT (JSON Web Tokens) or OAuth2.
Read the original article: