The OWASP Top 10 API Security Risks is significant because it provides an updated overview of the most critical security risks associated with APIs. OWASP’s guidance helps organizations understand and address common API vulnerabilities stemming from API misconfigurations, missing authentication controls, and more. The OWASP Top 10 API Risks guidance also explains how API attacks work, how to identify API abuse, and ways to protect your organization from API threats such as broken object level authorization (BOLA) attacks.
- API Security Risks: APIs are critical for enterprise’s cloud, digital, and AI initiatives but pose significant operational risks due to their constant access to sensitive data and systems, and the fact that APIs are often full of vulnerabilities such as lax authentication controls and coding errors made in development.
- Valuable OWASP Guidance: The OWASP Top 10 API Security Risks list shines light on API vulnerabilities including API misconfigurations and helps security teams understand threats including attacks exploiting API business logic.
- How Akamai Protects APIs: In this whitepaper, you’ll learn about each of the API risks that OWASP has researched, while gaining insights on how Akamai’s API security solution helps organizations detect and mitigate OWASP-identified API vulnerabilities and attack methods.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Akamai's API security solution helps mitigate BOLA risks by identifying and classifying API endpoints that are susceptible to BOLA exploitation based on received inputs and the relationships between API objects and properties. It also generates alerts on attempted or successful BOLA exploitation, ensuring immediate attention and action.
Akamai addresses the risk of Unrestricted Resource Consumption by identifying at-risk API endpoints and providing real-time alerts on attempted volumetric attacks. It also initiates workflows to slow down or block volumetric attacks and generates alerts on excessive errors, login attempts, or atypical behavior, ensuring that API endpoints are protected from denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
Akamai API Security can help mitigate Unrestricted Resource Consumption by identifying API endpoints that are lacking rate limits or are under attack through large volumetric dictionaries or credential stuffing attacks. Akamai can also initiate workflows to slow down or block volumetric attacks, and generate alerts on attempted volumetric attacks
Broken Function Level Authorization (BFLA) occurs when access control models for API endpoints are incorrectly implemented, allowing unauthorized access to sensitive information or the system as a whole. Akamai helps mitigate this risk by tracking behavioral timelines, applying security policies to sensitive functions, managing key rotation and revocation through its API Gateway, and generating alerts on suspicious attempts to access administrative functions.
It is important to manage and secure third-party APIs because organizations are increasingly reliant on them to extend services and functionality. Without proper security measures, such as encryption, data validation, sanitization, and resource consumption limits, third-party APIs can introduce significant security vulnerabilities. Akamai continuously monitors and validates these services to ensure security and generate alerts on potential exploitations.
Akamai helps organizations with Improper Inventory Management by persistently overseeing API traffic to discover hidden API endpoints and APIs with potential risks. It creates an up-to-date API inventory based on risk scoring and data classification, and generates alerts on a variety of potential exploitations, ensuring that all APIs, including shadow APIs, are identified and protected.
Security misconfiguration refers to the improper setup of security controls, which can leave a system vulnerable to attacks. This includes insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad hoc configurations, open cloud storage, and misconfigured HTTP(S) headers. Akamai assists in mitigating this risk by identifying shadow API endpoints, matching API endpoints against security configuration best practices, applying security policies through API security best practices, and generating alerts for misconfiguration or noncompliance with API security standards.