10 Best Practices to keep your API secure

API security is crucial for modern software development as it facilitates the resources for innovation. However, with the increased reliance on technology, attackers have focused on finding vulnerabilities in APIs to access sensitive data and take control of the underlying system. Hence, it's important for organizations to implement best API security practices to safeguard sensitive data and API functionality.

Here are the top 10 best practices for API security:

Secure Authentication and Authorization Methods:

To prevent malicious authentication, it is essential to use secure methods such as OAuth 2.0 or JSON Web Tokens (JWT) and secure authorization from being vulnerable to attacks.

Web Application Firewall:

Implement a robust web application firewall to identify and remove malicious traffic before it reaches the API gateway.

Encrypt Data in Transit:

To secure sensitive data transmitted over the network, it is important to use protocol encryptions such as TLS (Transport Layer Security) and SSL (Secure Socket Layer). This provides end-to-end encryption to protect data during transmission.

Rate Limiting:

To avoid attacks such as Denial of Service and similar ones, it's important to limit or control the traffic from requesting access to the API at the same time. This ensures the API remains available and responsive to legitimate requests.

Access Logs:

Implementing and maintaining access logs for your API can help track the clients who have accessed the API and their activities. This helps identify clients responsible for security breaches or API's unusual behavior.

Security Assessments:

Conduct regular security assessments to identify and remove vulnerabilities in the API. Test regularly for common security threats such as XSS (Cross-Site Scripting), SQL injection, and CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery).

Employee Training:

Ensuring API security in an organization requires basic security knowledge among employees dealing with the API. It's helpful if the principles of DevSecOps are followed in the organization. All employees should have a comprehensive understanding of API security and be skilled enough to implement it.

API Key Rotation:

API keys can be compromised if not used in combination with other security measures. It's recommended to use rate limiting, access logs, and key rotation in combination with API keys. API key rotation is an effective practice to keep the key secure from malicious hands.

Input Validation and Sanitization:

It's important to validate inputs to ensure their genuineness and prevent malicious intentions. Validation ensures only expected data is accepted, preventing attacks such as XSS and SQL injection.