When will the API chaos end? Ruishu Information strikes hard to eliminate the "chronic disease"

In the era of "everything can be API", quickly building products and services through API and responding to customer needs quickly have become essential skills for digital enterprises. However, at the same time, APIs carry increasingly complex application logic and more and more sensitive data, making APIs a key target of attack by the black industry.

In recent years, many well-known international companies have suffered huge blows due to API security negligence. Not only that, according to the "API Security Status Report for the First Quarter of 2022" released by the research department Salt Labs, malicious API traffic has increased by 681% in the past 12 months, and 95% of organizations have experienced API security incidents. However, most organizations are not prepared to deal with these challenges, and more than a third (34%) of companies do not have an API security strategy.

Five major API security risks, are you affected?

In 2021, my country's "Data Security Law" was officially implemented, data security entered the legal track, and API security also entered a new stage of legal construction. From the perspective of the technical requirements of the "Data Security Law" for data transmission, provision, and disclosure, domestic government and enterprise API applications mainly face five major management challenges and security risks:

Risk 1: API assets cannot be effectively managed

As the number of APIs grows too fast, many companies are not clear about how many APIs they have and what status the APIs are in. How can a large number of APIs be sorted out if they cannot be scanned and detected? If API assets are not clear, how can security responsibilities be divided and implemented? And how can the lifecycle management of API assets be solved?

Ruishu Solution: In response to the challenges of API asset management, Ruishu API Security Management Platform (API BotDefender) can continuously discover API interfaces, establish API lists, and compare them with the API lists provided by the business side to timely discover unknown APIs and zombie APIs. At the same time, it can classify and group API interfaces, assign responsible persons, and realize data decentralization management; and extract API interface styles to provide a visual display for API interfaces.

Risk 2: API security attack risk

Insecure APIs will continue to expand the attack surface of applications, making it easier for hackers to conduct reconnaissance, collect configuration information, and plan network attacks. When APIs face various security attacks, how can enterprises effectively identify and protect them? For example: Are the API request parameters compliant? Is the API interface call sequence compliant?

Ruishu Solution: Facing diverse API attacks, Ruishu API security management platform can define the API interface call sequence based on known business logic and dependencies, prevent access behaviors that bypass business logic, set interface request parameter call rules in advance, reject illegal API request parameter calls, reduce security configuration errors, and reduce the attack surface. At the same time, it supports API security attack detection and protection, and introduces semantic analysis technology to further improve detection accuracy.

Risk 3: Sensitive Data Control

Attacks against APIs have become the first choice for malicious attackers. More and more hackers use APIs to steal sensitive data and commit business fraud. If companies do not desensitize sensitive information and other data, and do not encrypt transmission, once the traffic is intercepted and cracked, it will have a serious impact on the rights and interests of companies and citizens. Therefore, companies need to have a deeper understanding of which APIs carry what type of sensitive information; how to identify sensitive data in API access; how to control sensitive data in APIs; how to respond to compliance audit requirements, etc.

Ruishu Solution: In order to better manage sensitive data and meet compliance audit requirements, Ruishu API security management platform has a built-in sensitive information detection engine, covering 18 sensitive data types such as name, mobile phone number, ID card, bank card, password, etc. It can automatically classify sensitive information, and gain real-time insight into sensitive data, plaintext passwords and weak passwords transmitted in both directions in the API interface, and promptly desensitize sensitive information in the API interface return message to avoid data leakage risks.

Risk 4: Abnormal API access risk

With the continuous upgrading of automated attack methods, even if enterprises have established mechanisms such as identity authentication, access authorization, and sensitive data protection, they are sometimes still unable to prevent hackers from using machines to simulate normal user behavior to launch attacks. Faced with multi-source low-frequency API access requests that log in with legitimate identities, simulate normal operations, and are from multiple sources, can enterprises detect whether the access behavior is abnormal? How to manage API access behavior and how to identify business risks from API access? How to implement control over abnormal access?

Ruishu Solution: Logging in with a legitimate identity, simulating normal operations, and low-frequency API access requests from multiple sources are important reasons why API attacks are difficult to detect. In response to this, Ruishu API security management and control platform monitors the access behavior of API interfaces in real time based on multiple dimensions, including access success rate, time consumption, TPS, number of concurrent access, attack events, etc., to establish an API access baseline, which can promptly detect abnormal access behaviors that deviate from the baseline. At the same time, the built-in API business threat model can see through common API business threats, such as: database collision, crawlers, etc., and perform human-machine identification efficiently and accurately.

Risk 5: Real-time security protection

Faced with unknown and diverse API attacks, enterprises need to enable real-time security protection and proactively discover and respond to API security threats to truly build a security defense line for their businesses. For example, can they block and fuse various risks in real time and in a fine-grained manner? Can they achieve protection without affecting their businesses?

Ruishu Solution: Based on the enterprise's needs for real-time security response and business development, Ruishu API BotDefender has built-in flexible API access control strategies. It can implement refined access control on API interfaces based on more than hundreds of elements such as API interfaces, API groups, API management responsible persons, source IPs, access frequencies, client fingerprints, API tokens, User Agents, HTTP request characteristics, etc. It supports multi-dimensional frequency limiting, interception, delay, etc., to achieve a balance between security and business.

At present, most companies rely mainly on traditional security mechanisms such as identity authentication, permission control, and request content verification for API security response. However, the black industry has achieved a high degree of modularization and marketization of various attack resources, making it impossible for companies to calmly deal with various emerging threats to APIs under the existing business model.

Compared with traditional security products, Ruishu API Security Management Platform (API BotDefender) was the first in the industry to propose the "ADMP Security Model" methodology, starting from the four perspectives of API "perception, discovery, monitoring, and protection", to achieve security governance of API data transmission, provision, and disclosure, and systematically guarantee API security. This makes up for the shortcomings of various products and has multiple core advantages:

Automated API asset management

Traditional API gateways mainly implement authentication and authorization, but lack discovery and control at the API security level.

Ruishu API Security Management Platform can quickly and automatically discover API assets, and can achieve high-precision recognition and style extraction of API interfaces, and give a clear identification of discovered APIs; at the same time, it displays a clear API list, and the access status of API interfaces is clear at a glance, helping users to achieve API asset lifecycle management.

API multi-dimensional attack protection

Traditional WAFs are based on rule bases and can only intercept security attacks based on the rules, but cannot fully understand business threats.

Ruishu API security management and control platform adopts the whole-process security threat protection technology, and comprehensively detects and analyzes abnormal behaviors based on semantic analysis rules, which significantly reduces the false alarm rate and missed alarm rate; through traffic analysis and behavior analysis technology, it accurately builds API business threat model. It not only covers the attack defense of OWASP API Security Top10, but also can quickly respond to various API business security threats such as crawlers and database collisions through API business threat model.

Industry-specific sensitive data control

Ruishu API Security Management Platform comes with a variety of sensitive data identification strategies by default, covering the identification of dozens of common sensitive data in industries such as government, finance, operators, and medical care. It can also customize and label sensitive data based on the targeted business characteristics of industry users to help users quickly identify sensitive data.

Dynamic response protection

Ruishu API security management and control platform can dynamically respond to and protect the results or specified conditions of attacks and abnormal behaviors, increasing the difficulty of attack methods such as reverse detection or machine learning analysis.

High energy treatment

Ruishu API security management and control platform optimizes data processing from the processes of collecting API data, deconstructing API messages, and connecting API upstream and downstream relationships. It can support API governance in ultra-large traffic environments and supports business access numbers (TPS) that are 20 times that of traditional methods.