Despite their capabilities and benefits, cloud-native applications also present several security challenges. Application programming interfaces (APIs) are among the top areas of risk for these applications. This isn’t surprising. As organizations look to enhance connections between digital services and increase data sharing between modern applications and systems, APIs are proliferating rapidly across hybrid and multicloud environments. According to Gartner, Inc., 82% of organizations use APIs internally while 71% use APIs provided by third parties such as SaaS vendors.
However, as more APIs are created and deployed in enterprise environments, they create a larger attack surface for security teams to protect. APIs introduce unique attack vectors as they provide direct access to cloud applications and sensitive backend data stores. Even with robust infrastructure security in place, APIs can expose critical systems and data to potential threats— making their security paramount in protecting cloud-native environments.
To defend against API-related risks and enhance API security posture, organizations need a comprehensive cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). A CNAPP provides critical visibility and proactive risk management by identifying misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and compliance issues in real time throughout the application lifecycle. This holistic approach also ensures APIs are assessed for security within the broader cloud application context, addressing potential threats at every layer of the cloud infrastructure. By integrating API security within a CNAPP, organizations can effectively manage the complexity and scale of their cloud-native environments.
API Security Risks: What You Need to Know
There’s an important perspective to keep in mind when we’re talking about API security: the reason for it, ultimately, is to protect cloud applications. All too often, insecure APIs expose cloud applications to threats, thus making the securing of APIs a crucial element of an effective security strategy.
Unlike many other cloud vulnerabilities, API risks don’t come solely from insecure configurations at the infrastructure level. Instead, these risks often stem from insecure implementations at the code level, a lack of visibility for security teams, and inadequate data protection practices:
- Source Code Vulnerabilities: This includes improper authentication and authorization, lack of input validation, and insecure coding practices. These vulnerabilities can create exploitable issues within the API, bypassing infrastructure-level protections. Findings from Microsoft’s 2024 State of Multicloud Risk Report revealed a significant concern for API security. In 2023, 65% of repositories contained source code vulnerabilities that remained in the code for an average of 58 days. Many of these vulnerabilities directly exposed APIs to potential exploits, highlighting the urgent need for robust API security measures to protect cloud applications from malicious attacks.
When vulnerable APIs are deployed, they can quickly scale across cloud environments—potentially exposing sensitive data, user and workload identities, internal systems, and more. This proliferation is driven by the rapid development and deployment of APIs, which can now happen in weeks or even days thanks to open-source code, AI-powered development tools, and the rise of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Ad hoc or periodically scheduled security testing simply cannot keep up with this pace, underscoring the necessity for continuous and comprehensive API security practices.
Currently, the responsibility for addressing API security largely falls on developers to adhere to best practices. However, developers are not always API security experts, leading to potential oversights. Instead, organizations should adopt a tooling-based approach that arms developers with the right assurance capabilities and guardrails and includes oversight from central security teams to ensure robust API security.
- Lack of Visibility: APIs are often hosted across various cloud environments and through different gateways and compute resources, making centralized management challenging. This decentralization can lead to the emergence of shadow APIs that are not documented or monitored by security teams. Without clear visibility, it becomes difficult to secure APIs effectively—after all, you can’t secure what you don’t know exists. The complexity of API landscapes also makes it tough for organizations to maintain an accurate inventory of all their APIs. Unmonitored and potentially vulnerable APIs can slip through the cracks, and the rapid development and deployment pace further complicates these issues. As APIs continue to proliferate, implementing continuous discovery of API inventory and management becomes increasingly essential to ensure comprehensive security.
- Data Exposure: According to Gartner, current data indicates that the average API breach leads to at least 10 times more leaked data than the average security breach. APIs frequently handle sensitive data. Ensuring that data is securely transmitted and stored is crucial. Inadequate data protection can lead to data breaches and unauthorized access, exposing critical information to malicious actors. This can include personal information, financial data, intellectual property, and other sensitive records.
Securing APIs requires a different approach than securing cloud infrastructure. While infrastructure security focuses on policies and configurations at the control plane level, API security must address vulnerabilities and configurations embedded within the application code itself. This highlights the need for a comprehensive strategy that encompasses both infrastructure and API security to protect cloud applications effectively.
3 Essential Steps for Building a Stronger API Security Strategy
To bolster your API security strategy effectively, consider these three vital steps, all of which can be enhanced through the deployment of a CNAPP:
- Discover and Assess Risk Exposure: Begin by identifying all APIs in use across your organization. This includes documenting both known and shadow APIs, including third-party APIs from SaaS applications, to gain comprehensive visibility. Once identified, assess the risk exposure of each API by evaluating factors such as data sensitivity, access controls, usage patterns, and external exposure. This step is crucial for understanding where the most significant risk lies and prioritizing security efforts accordingly. Both CNAPP and API management solutions can streamline this process by providing tools for API discovery, inventory management, and continuous risk assessment—ensuring that all APIs are accounted for and monitored. A CNAPP can also help prioritize risks with context into the broader cloud application environment, making it easier to address the most critical vulnerabilities first.
- Harden APIs Against Vulnerabilities: Next, it’s important to assess APIs against security best practices, including enforcing strong authentication and authorization. Refer to the OWASP API Security Top 10 guide as a benchmark for addressing common API vulnerabilities and understanding the top risks in API security. Ensuring secure coding practices and conducting regular security audits is necessary but not enough. It’s essential to identify and harden security misconfigurations at scale, which can be efficiently managed through automation with a CNAPP, including the use of dynamic testing as well as inspecting runtime configurations and analyzing API traffic to identify vulnerabilities before they are exploited. This approach ensures continuous monitoring and that vulnerabilities are addressed promptly. API management is crucial in this strategy, offering tools to centrally enforce security policies and manage access controls to build proactive defense.
- Monitor and Protect APIs from Threats and Attacks: Even with robust preventive measures, it’s vital for security teams to monitor API traffic continuously to catch any threats that manage to bypass initial defenses. Advanced threat detection systems that utilize machine learning are crucial for identifying suspicious activities and anomalies in API traffic, including business logic abuse and more conventional web threats. CNAPP solutions that consolidate cloud workload threat protection into their offering are key to not just enabling this but also helping piece together incidents from threat detections at different levels. Web Application Firewalls (WAF) can help to further filter and block malicious traffic that is identified based on threat intelligence and threat protection rulesets while also providing protection against malicious bots. Meanwhile, DDoS protection can help protect against volumetric attacks. These layers come together to provide a more effective defense.
API security is a critical component of modern digital infrastructure, given the extensive role APIs play in facilitating data exchange and connectivity between systems. To ensure that APIs are fortified against vulnerabilities, comprehensive security strategies are essential. By leveraging a CNAPP alongside robust API management solutions, organizations can streamline their security processes, achieve comprehensive visibility, and maintain continuous monitoring. These measures are crucial for protecting the integrity and availability of applications in an increasingly interconnected digital landscape.
For more information, download the white paper: “Building a comprehensive API security strategy: An integrated approach to API management and security” and visit the Microsoft cloud security solutions page.
- Gartner®, Hype Cycle for APIs, 2024, 02 July 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved
- Gartner®, Market Guide for API Protection, 29 May 2024. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved
