APIs are crucial building blocks of modern businesses. Organizations are now leveraging the power of APIs to offer new services to their customers. APIs are enabling organizations to scale their businesses on a larger scale. APIs also play an important part in all web-based and mobile applications including backend applications. As APIs handle a very high volume of sensitive data on a daily basis, ensuring their safety through persistent testing is critical for businesses.
In the following article, we will be discussing the steps involved in the Security Testing of your API.
So Let’s begin
- Information Gathering
In the first step, we need to collect all the details of the APIs involved in the businesses. We need to identify the role played by the APIs, the endpoints, the type of APIs, and other details.
Further, we also need to have information about users, roles, requests, and responses involved in APIs.
- Threat analysis
In this phase, we need to identify the scenarios of authenticated and unauthenticated endpoint attacks. Similarly, we need to evaluate the types of possible threats that may affect the target APIs within the attack surface.
- Vulnerability scanning
When it comes to API security testing we need to first perform tests to identify potential vulnerabilities and scan for the Open Web Application Security Project(OWASP) API Top 10 vulnerabilities.
What are the OWASP API Security Top 10 Vulnerabilities 2019
- Broken object-level authorization
- Broken authentication
- Excessive data exposure
- Lack of resources and rate limiting
- Broken function level authorization
- Mass assignment
- Security misconfiguration
- Injection
- Improper assets management
- Insufficient logging and monitoring
- Penetration Testing
The next step includes conducting a penetration test on the APIs. To do this we can manually detect authorization issues and logical flaws missed by automated vulnerability scanners. The process of Penetration starts with reconnaissance, and the goal of this step is to identify any sensitive information that may help in the following phases of testing, which can include email addresses, usernames, technology in use, and other such details.
The second phase is the threat modeling phase which serves to evaluate the types of threats that may affect the target APIs.
The third phase includes the Vulnerability analysis phase. Vulnerability scans are run to evaluate the attack surface in scope.
The next phase includes the exploitation of all the potential vulnerabilities identified in the previous phases of the assessment.
After the exploitation phase, the monitoring and analysis phase may continue so that the collected data is used for the prioritization and criticality ranking of identified vulnerabilities.
- Reporting
This is the last step of the API security testing process. Once the execution of the security testing process is done we need to share a comprehensive report which contains the critical issues and vulnerabilities present with the severity level. These issues need to be plugged in based on the priority set.
What to find in the report:
- Findings of vulnerabilities
- Vulnerability prioritization report
- Remediation and security recommendations
Conclusion:
In the above article, we saw the importance of security testing in APIs and how we can perform API security testing in five different steps. Testrig's API security Testing services assure complete end-to-end coverage of API security tests to secure your APIs. The services also help you to know whether your critical data is at risk and design a remediation plan for vulnerabilities detected in the APIs.
Although API security testing can be a challenging task, a trusted Security Testing Company like Testrig Technologies can help you secure your APIs.
For more information contact Testrig Technologies.
Continuing our mini-series on backend testing, we’re diving deep into API testing to discover how it can increase apps’ quality without significantly raising the QA costs.
Almost any application relies on third-party APIs for some of its functionality, from signing in with Facebook to finding a location with Google Maps. But few teams spend enough efforts on API testing unless their APIs are public.
This can have disastrous consequences.
But no worries, this guide will teach you everything you need to know about API testing:
- What is API testing and why it’s important
- How is API testing done?
- Types of API tests
- Automation
- API testing tools
What is API testing and why it’s important
Application Programming Interfaces (API) is what allows developers to integrate features from other apps into their own products without having to build them from scratch.
This means users can log into your event management app via Facebook, find a venue they want on Google Maps, and buy a ticket via a booking service. All without leaving your app.
APIs enhance user experience and make developers’ life easier.
They can also connect different components of an app. In a microservices architecture, APIs glue together different modules, each having a separate database and interface. This means they can function independently and provide a higher uptime.
API testing helps ensure that your application’s APIs are secured and perform as expected.
Check out our blog here for additional API testing benefits: https://blog.qasource.com/advantages-of-api-testing/ and learn what all you need to know about API testing.
API testing is a one of software testing types.
API testing involves testing application programming interfaces directly and as part of integration testing to determine if they meet expectations for functionality, reliability, performance, and security.
API testing is one of the most demanding segments of the software and quantitative analysis testing.
Before we discuss this testing type, we will first understand what exactly the API is.To get more information visit: https://pradtutorials.com/api-testing/
