Posted by Miami, USA: Sensedia, a global leader in delivering API solutions for companies adopting a more digital, connected, and open strategy announced five pillars for API Security.
“January 28, Data Privacy Day, is an international event to raise awareness and promote privacy and data protection best practices. Sensedia observes the importance of respecting privacy, safeguarding data, and enabling trust every day,” said Marcilio Oliveira, Sensedia’s Founder and Chief Growth Officer.
“Sensedia has a long-standing commitment to privacy in the role that Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) play in connecting data. APIs are everywhere. Having a robust and complex API portfolio requires a solid API security strategy to mitigate privacy breach risks.”
APIs have revolutionised how data is shared and play a prominent role in data sharing. In modern architecture, security is more complex and requires multiple layers within applications and integrations to address different security requirements and ensure the entire software ecosystem is protected.
As companies expand their digital offerings to meet consumer demand, the APIs required to connect systems and data become more numerous and complicated.
From microservices to API gateways and service mesh, businesses and API developers must remain vigilant to ensure each connection offers the most advanced security to keep the data safeguarded of their customers, suppliers, employees, and partners from an attack.
With each new API released, institutions need to ensure sharing is secure. Well-designed, developed, and managed APIs block unauthorised access to hardware and software information, making it difficult for intruders to steal sensitive data.
Sensedia offers information on five crucial API design and implementation pillars to protect data in its free API security reference guide. Each pillar should be carefully evaluated for securing data within and between ecosystems when designing APIs. The five pillars are as follows:
Confidentiality: APIs are designed to avoid data leaks, meet regulations and provide clear guidance on how data must be managed in different application lifecycle stages. The company develops data protection from the API perspective, addressing known threats like information disclosure, man-in-the-middle attacks, and data scraping. HTTPS with TLS encryption is the minimum requirement recommended for each API connection. Additional security layers may be necessary, including applying cryptography to ensure data confidentiality is guaranteed.
Availability: Digital businesses require accessible and highly available APIs to guarantee their revenue and reputation. But with availability comes added risk. The company works with companies to reduce risks by monitoring API traffic and establishing a reliable alerting policy to identify unusual behaviours like big usage spikes coming from a specific area or country. When companies are warned of suspicious behaviours as soon as they happen, it provides them more time to address incidents and avoid service disruption.
Authentication/Authorisation: The API gateway is “in front” of all user requests. By taking steps to ensure the request is coming from someone authorised to access the data, the company helps customers avoid unauthorised data breaches and protect access through various methods of verification.
Integrity: APIs are exposed to external usage, making them vulnerable to attacks that try to modify or inject content. The company employs best practices to prevent common strategies like injections, cross-site scripting, and cross-site request forgery from impacting the API ecosystem.
Audit: The company realises that the audit process must be handled with extreme care, understanding what to audit and what to observe. It works with businesses to prepare for regulators and ensure audit information is trusted and secure.
“While January 28 is an excellent day for businesses to reflect on the importance of protecting personal information, organisations must look carefully at their data security all year long, making periodic reviews of how securely their ecosystems share data. As our world becomes more open and connected, it’s every company’s responsibility to safeguard sensitive data,” added Oliveira.