Imagine that you have an Ecommerce business, and you want to build a comprehensive website for it, so you will need to have a web pages where the clients can search for a specific products, choose the size or the colors, place the orders, make the payments and so on.
These pages represent the web applications, and to integrate these pages with the stores and the banks and the delivery agents you need to use the APIs.
This is a simple example about using the web applications and the APIs in our daily life. And a lot of business nowadays relay on such things to meet the customer satisfactions.
And this leads us to think about how companies are securing the customers data from being breached, and why we need to secure the web applications and the APIs.

What is a Web application and API?

A web application is a software application that is accessed and used over the internet through a web browser, or mobile client application it could be hosted on remote servers and can be accessed by users from anywhere with an internet connection.
As they operate within client-server architecture, the client requests resources and interacts with the application’s UI, while the server processes these requests, executes business logic, retrieves data from databases, and sends back the required information to the client.
Many types of web applications are built using client-side scripts (like HTML, JavaScript, or CSS) and server-side scripts (like PHP or ASP) for examples: Amazon and ecommerce sites, Gmail, Airbnb, etc…
API on the other hand stands for “Application Programming Interface.”, and it is a set of rules and protocols that allows different software applications to communicate and interact with each other.
APIs are also considered as a contract between two software components that specifies how one component should interact with another. They allow developers to use the functionalities provided by other applications or services without needing to understand their internal workings.
APIs are incredibly useful for web applications and play a crucial role in enhancing their functionality and enabling integration with other services.
Usually APIs transfer data in a structured format, often using JSON or XML, which allows applications to understand and process the information efficiently, and there are three categories of API protocols or architectures: REST, RPC and SOAP.

OWASP top5 API Threats (1)

1. Broken Object-Level Authorization
   APIs tend to expose endpoints that handle object identifiers, creating a wide attack surface of Object Level Access Control issues. Object level authorization checks should be considered in every function that accesses a data source using an ID from the user.
2. Broken Authentication
   Authentication mechanisms are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise authentication tokens or to exploit implementation flaws to assume other user’s identities temporarily or permanently. Compromising a system’s ability to identify the client/user, compromises API security overall.
3. Broken Object Property Level Authorization
   This category combines API3:2019 Excessive Data Exposure and API6:2019 – Mass Assignment, focusing on the root cause: the lack of or improper authorization validation at the object property level. This leads to information exposure or manipulation by unauthorized parties.
4. Unrestricted Resource Consumption
   Satisfying API requests requires resources such as network bandwidth, CPU, memory, and storage. Other resources such as emails/SMS/phone calls or biometrics validation are made available by service providers via API integrations, and paid for per request. Successful attacks can lead to Denial of Service or an increase of operational costs.
5. Broken Function Level Authorization
   Complex access control policies with different hierarchies, groups, and roles, and an unclear separation between administrative and regular functions, tend to lead to authorization flaws. By exploiting these issues, attackers can gain access to other users’ resources and/or administrative functions.

Web application and API protection (WAAP)

According to Gartner, web application and API protection are the evolution of cloud web application firewall services, expanding scope and security depth. Unlike a traditional firewall, a WAAP firewall is a highly specialized security tool specifically designed to protect web applications and APIs. We can say that WAAP firewalls focus on the application layer from the OSI model, it is layer 7 firewalls.
But why is it important to consider web application and API security? The answer is that these kinds of applications and APIs are connected to the internet, and on the other hand, they also have access to sensitive data in your database. This makes them a big target for bad actors and susceptible to cybercriminals. Moreover, traditional security solutions can’t provide effective protection against the threats coming from web applications and APIs.

SolidPoint web application and APIs security solution

SolidPoint is an effective solution to Automate your application security checks with the highest precision tool available on the market, discover all existing API endpoints with one tool, and improve your SDLC,
During black-box security analysis only the client-side code is available. Analyzing server side is only possible by interacting with its interface endpoints.

Black-box vulnerability testing usually consists of three stages:

1. Attack surface enumeration: searching for available server-side endpoints (API endpoints);
2. Sending requests with attack vectors to discovered endpoints;
3. Analyzing results.

The discovery stage helps revealing the entire attack surface by determining all server API endpoints across your web assets which is a crucial step of any black-box analysis in web and API security; also scan the corners of your web assets that other tools miss with advanced crawling and client-side code analysis.
The detection stage helps to discover the hidden API security vulnerabilities going beyond OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities, with Advanced XSS detection technology, including DOM XSS, with zero false positives.
The last stage is to resolve by helping developers fix the issues fast with clear reproduction steps and detailed recommendations based on years of security experience, with less false positives and give developers the information they need to quickly resolve each issue.
Moreover, you can automate the process and integrate it with your development lifecycle to perform recurring scans of your applications and APIs.

Conclusion:

As everything is connected nowadays and uses APIs to share data, operations, or both, it is very important to look at the security of this connection window, as it is a common target for hackers aiming to compromise customer data and use it.
There are many solutions to protect web applications and APIs, with different strategies and methods. The most important thing to understand is that you can’t protect what you can’t see. This is one of the reasons why SolidPoint is one of the leading solutions in this field due to its advanced techniques to discover and detect your attack surface.