A Cheatsheet to Build Secure APIs

An insecure API can compromise your entire application. Follow these strategies to mitigate the risk:

Using HTTPS

• Encrypts data in transit and protects against man-in-the-middle attacks.
• This ensures that data hasn’t been tampered with during transmission.

Rate Limiting and Throttling

• Rate limiting prevents DoS attacks by limiting requests from a single IP or user.
• The goal is to ensure fairness and prevent abuse.

Validation of Inputs

• Defends against injection attacks and unexpected data format.
• Validate headers, inputs, and payload.

Authentication and Authorization

• Don’t use basic auth for authentication.
• Instead, use a standard authentication approach like JWTs
  • Use a random key that is hard to guess as the JWT secret
  • Make token expiration short -For authorization, use OAuth

Using Role-based Access Control

• RBAC simplifies access management for APIs and reduces the risk of unauthorized actions.
• Granular control over user permission based on roles.

Monitoring

• Monitoring the APIs is the key to detecting issues and threats early.
  • Use tools like Kibana, Cloudwatch, Datadog, and Slack for monitoring
  • Don’t log sensitive data like credit card info, passwords, credentials, etc.