Full Report
Organizations continue their digital transformation, with APIs now serving as the main communication links between applications, platforms, services, and partners. The widespread use of APIs introduces new security risks despite their common presence. The growing number of APIs significantly increases the cyber risks that security teams must address as they keep up with technological advances. The Akamai State of the Internet report shows that APIs made up more than 80% of internet traffic between 2023 and 2024. This major shift has exposed multiple security weaknesses as it has happened. The main challenge organizations face is identifying and controlling their growing attack surface. The increase in APIs used creates multiple potential entry points for attackers. Externally accessible APIs often exist by mistake, allowing attackers to perform unauthorized actions and possibly causing data breaches and API exploitation. The problem gets harder because organizations often don’t have a clear view of their assets: shadow APIs, unknown endpoints, and undocumented interfaces stay hidden. Without a complete inventory, security teams are left in the dark and cannot fully protect their systems. API security standardization remains inconsistent, causing major problems. The rush to deliver quickly often leads development teams to implement authentication and encryption policies carelessly. Many API releases still lack basic security measures. API authentication and authorization systems encounter continuous security challenges. Protocols like OAuth and JWT provide robust frameworks, but their complexity can lead to implementation issues across many APIs. Improper implementation of these protocols creates security gaps that attackers can exploit for privilege escalation or unauthorized data access. The fast-paced DevOps environment heightens the risk of vulnerabilities. When APIs are updated, security settings often lag, causing configuration drift and introducing new security risks. API security testing often receives inadequate attention from many organizations, raising serious concerns. APIs in applications usually undergo less thorough testing before launch compared to traditional software. This results in numerous security flaws, including business logic errors, data exposure vulnerabilities, and potential abuse attack scenarios, often remaining undetected. These vulnerabilities in APIs allow attackers to execute logic-based attacks, credential stuffing, and denial-of-service attacks, ultimately damaging services and increasing operational costs. Security tools that rely on traditional methods struggle to detect threats targeting APIs specifically. Relying solely on perimeter defenses fails to catch common attacks that exploit payloads or injection flaws. Ensuring API encryption and managing keys adds extra complexity, especially when data moves through multiple cloud systems in hybrid environments. The last challenge comes from the human factor. Organizations struggle because they lack the resources and specialized knowledge needed to defend APIs against threats. Securing APIs requires staff who understand application development, network security, and cloud architecture principles. Cybersecurity teams are often understaffed and lack the technical skills to handle all types of API threats. LevelBlue Managed WAAP offers comprehensive API security with automated exposure detection, real-time threat intelligence, and data protection features, supported by Akamai’s industry-leading technology. The distinctive managed security solution detects suspicious API activities, blocks them, and monitors excessive queries to prevent abuse tactics like credential stuffing and site scraping before they can harm the business. LevelBlue provides API security through expert-led services, combined with layered defenses, to make protection easier for users. This platform offers robust operational security through proactive monitoring and incident reporting, as well as off-hours configuration assistance to minimize the workload on internal teams. LevelBlue shifts WAAP from just a product to an active security strategy, allowing organizations to secure their APIs and drive secure innovation in their business. LevelBlue Managed WAAP acts as a vital partner in environments where APIs serve as both business enablers and potential security threats, providing transparency along with management and protection against complex challenges. Unlike traditional tools, LevelBlue Managed WAAP offers a comprehensive management solution that addresses modern API security needs. Available in multiple tiers, it provides a solution for organizations of all sizes and security maturity levels to meet their application and API security goals.
Analysis Summary
# Best Practices: Securing the Modern API Landscape
## Overview
These practices address the security risks introduced by the widespread reliance on APIs for digital transformation. The primary focus is on achieving comprehensive control over the rapidly expanding API attack surface, standardizing security implementation, improving testing rigor, and addressing staffing/knowledge gaps.
## Key Recommendations
### Immediate Actions
1. **Inventory Attack Surface:** Immediately map and document all externally accessible APIs, paying special attention to identifying "shadow APIs," unknown endpoints, and undocumented interfaces.
2. **Mandate Basic Security Posture:** Enforce a baseline standard that requires all newly deployed or updated APIs to implement fundamental security measures, including minimum required authentication and encryption protocols.
3. **Review Critical Authentication Implementations:** Conduct an immediate audit of existing OAuth and JWT implementations, focusing on complexity-driven implementation pitfalls that could allow for privilege escalation or unauthorized data access.
### Short-term Improvements (1-3 months)
1. **Establish API Security Testing Cadence:** Integrate mandatory, thorough security testing (beyond standard functional testing) into the CI/CD pipeline for all API releases, specifically targeting business logic errors and potential abuse scenarios.
2. **Address Configuration Drift:** Implement automated configuration auditing to detect and remediate deviations between desired security settings and the actual deployed state of API infrastructure, especially after updates.
3. **Enforce Encryption and Key Management Standards:** Develop and enforce standardized procedures for API encryption across all data in transit and at rest, particularly focusing on key rotation and secure management in hybrid/multi-cloud environments.
### Long-term Strategy (3+ months)
1. **Develop Specialized Staffing Strategy:** Initiate training programs or hiring initiatives focused on developing staff expertise in application security, cloud architecture, and API-specific threat models to close internal knowledge gaps.
2. **Adopt Specialized API Security Tooling:** Move beyond traditional perimeter defenses by adopting security tools specifically designed to inspect API payloads, identify injection flaws unique to APIs, and detect logic-based/abuse attacks (e.g., credential stuffing, scraping).
3. **Standardize Security Governance:** Create and enforce a standardized API security policy framework that development teams must adhere to, ensuring consistency in authentication, authorization, and data handling across the entire API inventory.
## Implementation Guidance
### For Small Organizations
- **Prioritize Visibility:** Focus initial efforts heavily on identifying and retiring or immediately securing all accidental external-facing APIs (shadow APIs).
- **Leverage Managed Services:** Consider utilizing comprehensive Managed Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) solutions to offload the complexity of 24/7 monitoring, specialized threat detection, and configuration management that internal teams may lack the resources for.
- **Use Standardized Libraries:** Mandate the use of well-vetted, standard security libraries for authentication (e.g., OAuth flows) to reduce the risk of complex implementation errors.
### For Medium Organizations
- **Integrate Security into DevOps (SecDevOps):** Implement automated security gates in the CI/CD pipeline to proactively check for missing security controls before deployment.
- **Focus on Configuration Management:** Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) compliance tooling to prevent configuration drift between staging and production environments for API gateways and services.
- **Conduct Logic Testing:** Begin formal security testing programs focused on uncovering complex vulnerabilities like business logic flaws that automated scanners often miss.
### For Large Enterprises
- **Implement Comprehensive Asset Discovery:** Deploy continuous, automated discovery mechanisms capable of tracking all API changes, new endpoints, and dependencies across complex hybrid/multi-cloud architectures.
- **Establish Security Champions Program:** Embed security expertise within development teams to ensure security standardization is adopted pervasively and to minimize the burden on centralized security teams.
- **Adopt Advanced Threat Mitigation:** Implement solutions capable of rate limiting, behavioral analysis, and real-time threat intelligence specifically tailored for API abuse tactics (e.g., excessive querying, credential stuffing).
## Configuration Examples
*(Note: The provided text emphasizes *what* needs robust implementation (OAuth, JWT, Encryption) rather than providing specific code snippets. The actionable guidance must focus on the *process*.)*
To secure authentication standards:
1. **JWT Implementation:** Standardize on token validation mechanisms that strictly check token signature, expiry (`exp`), audience (`aud`), and issuer (`iss`) as defined by established RFCs.
2. **OAuth Hardening:** Ensure that sensitive flows (like client credentials or resource owner password grants) are strictly controlled, and that scope validation is enforced rigorously on *every* API call.
3. **Key Management:** Implement automated secret rotation for encryption keys used in API communications, ensuring keys are stored in centralized, hardened vaults (e.g., HashiCorp Vault, AWS KMS).
## Compliance Alignment
- **OWASP API Security Top 10:** Use this framework as the primary standard for vulnerability identification during security testing and code reviews.
- **NIST SP 800-53 / ISO 27001:** Align the development of robust API authentication and authorization controls (AC and SC families) with established governmental or organizational security frameworks.
## Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- **Relying Solely on Perimeter Defenses:** Do not assume traditional WAFs or perimeter tools can effectively catch threats targeting API payloads or logic flaws.
- **Inconsistent Standardization:** Avoid having different development teams implement authentication controls in completely unique, custom ways, as this leads to exploitable implementation gaps.
- **Lagging Security Updates:** Never deploy API updates where the security configuration (e.g., firewall rules, gateway policies) lags behind the application code changes.
- **Underestimating Business Logic:** Do not limit testing to technical vulnerabilities (like XSS/SQLi); prioritize testing complex business process flows for abuse potential.
## Resources
- **API Security Foundation:** Utilize established industry benchmarks and testing methodologies (e.g., OWASP API Security Top 10).
- **Accelerated Security Delivery:** Implement solutions providing automated exposure detection, real-time threat intelligence, and specialized API protection capabilities (e.g., Managed WAAP services like LevelBlue).
- **DevOps Integration:** Explore security tooling integrated directly into the CI/CD pipeline to ensure proactive detection, rather than reactive scanning.