Detecting and mitigating insecure APIs in cloud services
In today's world, all modern developments are based on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to communicate between system components, mostly based on web services (using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)) or REST APIs. The fact that APIs are publicly exposed makes them an easy target for attackers trying to access a system and cause damage. Some common consequences of insecure APIs are as follows:
- Data breaches
- Data leakage
- Damage to data integrity
- Denial of service
Some common examples of attacks exploiting insecure APIs are as follows:
- Due to a lack of input validation, an attacker can misuse an exposed API and inject malicious code through the API into a backend database.
- Due to a lack of input validation, an attacker can perform an SQL injection through an exposed API and exfiltrate customer data from a retail site.
- Due to a lack of application access control mechanisms...
