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Advanced API Security
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APIs are becoming increasingly popular for exposing business functionalities to the rest of the world. According to an infographic published by Layer 7, 86.5% of organizations will have an API program in place in the next five years. Of those, 43.2% already have one. APIs are also the foundation of building communication channels in the Internet of Things (IoT). From motor vehicles to kitchen appliances, countless items are beginning to communicate with each other via APIs. Cisco estimates that as many as 50 billion devices could be connected to the Internet by 2020. This book is about securing your most important APIs. As is the case with any software system design, people tend to ignore the security element during the API design phase. Only at deployment or at the time of integration do they start to address security. Security should never be an afterthought—it’s an integral part of any software system design, and it should be well thought out from the design’s inception. One objective of this book is to educate you about the need for security and the available options for securing an API. The book also guides you through the process and shares best practices for designing APIs for rock-solid security. API security has evolved a lot in the last five years. The growth of standards has been exponential. OAuth 2.0 is the most widely adopted standard. But it’s more than just a standard—it’s a framework that lets people build standards on top of it. The book explains in depth how to secure APIs, from traditional HTTP Basic Authentication to OAuth 2.0 and the standards built around it, such as OpenID Connect, User Managed Access (UMA), and many more. JSON plays a major role in API communication. Most of the APIs developed today support only JSON, not XML. This book also focuses on JSON security. JSON Web Encryption (JWE) and JSON Web Signature (JWS) are two increasingly popular standards for securing JSON messages. The latter part of this book covers JWE and JWS in detail. Another major objective of this book is to not just present concepts and theories, but also explain each of them with concrete examples. The book presents a comprehensive set of examples that work with APIs from Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo!, Salesforce, Flickr, and GitHub. The evolution of API security is another topic covered in the book. It’s extremely useful to understand how security protocols were designed in the past and how the drawbacks discovered in them pushed us to where we are today. The book covers some older security protocols such as Flickr Authentication, Yahoo! BBAuth, Google AuthSub, Google ClientLogin, and ProtectServe in detail. I hope this book effectively covers this much-needed subject matter for API developers, and I hope you enjoy reading it.
Prabath Siriwardena - Personal Name
978-1-4302-6817-8
NONE
Information Technology
English
2014
1-248
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