Summary

We have covered a lot in this chapter. By now, you should have a good understanding of how APIs can be attacked and how sometimes benign flaws can lead to severe compromise. On a note of caution, we have seen how easily flaws can be introduced and, likewise, how easily an attacker can use these flaws to compromise a system. On a more optimistic note, many of the flaws covered can easily be detected early in the development life cycle and, with education and sound design principles, can be avoided entirely.

With our sound grounding in the fundamentals of APIs, let’s focus on how APIs can be attacked in the next section.