5 Tendencias De API Que Esperar En 2022

Independientemente de la industria, muchos equipos y organizaciones tienden a adoptar API. Para aprovechar nuevas oportunidades, las empresas adoptan una plataforma de administración de API que puede consumir de manera segura las API externas de IA y ML disponibles. Esto requiere características de seguridad de API avanzadas , análisis sólidos y una interfaz conveniente para administrar el ciclo de vida.

Durante el último año, el crecimiento global del ecosistema API ha sido impresionante y tuvo una función crucial para mantener las empresas en funcionamiento. Según el Informe sobre el estado de las API de 2021 de Postman, las organizaciones seguirán invirtiendo en las API como parte esencial de sus estrategias comerciales. Y según la mayoría de los encuestados (94 %), las inversiones en API crecerán o permanecerán igual durante el próximo año.

Pero, la industria de API está cambiando constantemente. Las API se utilizan todo el tiempo de maneras nuevas y emocionantes, lo que significa que siempre hay tendencias emergentes a las que prestar atención. ¡Aquí hay cinco de las principales tendencias de API para vigilar en 2022!

1. API de inteligencia artificial y aprendizaje automático

Teniendo en cuenta todo lo mencionado anteriormente, podemos anticipar que en 2022 muchas organizaciones comenzarán a utilizar tecnologías de IA o ML simplemente porque muchas más estarán disponibles a través de las API. Las principales áreas de interés incluyen el reconocimiento de voz, los chatbots, el análisis predictivo y las herramientas de automatización del servicio al cliente.

Un ejemplo de API AI/ML que vale la pena mencionar es Amazon Machine API. Esta API ayuda a los usuarios a realizar diferentes tareas de aprendizaje automático y permite crear, entrenar e implementar fácilmente modelos de ML. La API se basa en la plataforma en la nube de Amazon y permite a los usuarios elegir entre muchos servicios de IA preentrenados para pronósticos, visión por computadora, lenguaje y otras capacidades.

2. API como producto

Las API permiten la formación de modelos comerciales completamente nuevos, como API-as-a-Product . API-as-a-Product es una tendencia de rápido crecimiento en la esfera del desarrollo de software. Una API se puede utilizar junto con una oferta principal o como un producto independiente. Por ejemplo, suponga que un negocio se desarrolla primero como un producto físico, un artefacto técnico o una oferta de empresa a empresa (B2B). En ese caso, la API puede evaluarse y convertirse en una extensión premium. La lógica comercial de API es una oferta central en sí misma.

Los negocios B2B responden a las tendencias cambiantes, y la API como producto es la evolución natural del panorama B2B. Un buen ejemplo de este tipo de oferta de productos es Twilio, una plataforma de facilitación de comunicaciones. Twilio no es una plataforma de chat en sí misma, es una plataforma de conexión diseñada para permitir que los agentes y clientes se comuniquen en varias plataformas. Este producto central ofrece beneficios de comunicación a las empresas por integrar canales probados en su infraestructura existente en lugar de crear sus propios canales y métodos de comunicación.

3. Desarrollo de API de código bajo y sin código

El uso de técnicas de programación tradicionales para implementar API entre dos aplicaciones parece ser simple; sin embargo, la integración de API entre varias aplicaciones en un entorno de producción puede ser un desafío. Y aquí, las técnicas de programación low-code pueden ayudar a las empresas a desarrollar sus aplicaciones a través de una sencilla interfaz de arrastrar y soltar para crear la funcionalidad deseada. El beneficio de esto no es solo la reducción del tiempo de comercialización, sino también la reducción del costo y la dependencia de equipos de desarrollo costosos. Otro beneficio notable es que las plataformas sin código se pueden personalizar fácilmente. Como resultado, una herramienta de código bajo puede hacer que la integración de API sea mucho más fácil sin necesidad de expertos en TI especializados.

Antes, pocas empresas podían presumir de un enfoque low-code/no-code . Aún así, hoy en día, los servicios SaaS, los proveedores de la nube y las tecnologías de mainframe permiten reducir la cantidad de codificación requerida.

A medida que la adopción de API continúa aumentando en todas las industrias, las funciones de código bajo/sin código serán cada vez más importantes en 2022. Las empresas que buscan escalar nuevas API deben aplicar enfoques de código bajo/sin código para alcanzar la eficiencia en el ciclo de vida del desarrollo.

4. Estándares de seguridad de API

La seguridad de la API es la protección de la integridad de la API, y las empresas que adoptan la tecnología de IA y ML deberían priorizar especialmente la seguridad de la API. AI y ML requieren cantidades masivas de datos y prácticas de seguridad para escalar, proteger y servir mejor a los clientes. Las medidas de seguridad cubren muchos esquemas, incluida la clave API, la autenticación básica HTTP y OpenID Connect . Además, debe comprender si la infraestructura de la empresa es segura, establecer una cadencia de pruebas regulares de penetración de infraestructura y aplicaciones, y detectar si tiene alguna vulnerabilidad.

En el informe de 2021 de Postman , cuando se les preguntó qué factores se consideran antes de integrarse con una API, más de dos tercios de los encuestados mencionaron estos cuatro factores: seguridad, rendimiento, confiabilidad y documentación.

Las API rotas, expuestas o pirateadas pueden causar importantes filtraciones de datos. Y a medida que más y más API se construyen y utilizan con frecuencia en casi todas las industrias, se deben tomar medidas de seguridad adicionales. La seguridad y el cumplimiento de las normas se encuentran entre las señales más importantes de la madurez de una empresa. Es crucial proteger los datos, y la mejor manera de proteger las API es seguir los estándares de seguridad de las API.

Algunas de las mejores maneras de elevar las medidas de seguridad son:

• Busque vulnerabilidades específicas para identificar puntos débiles y remediarlos.
• El uso de cifrado respalda la seguridad de API al hacer que los datos sean ilegibles para usuarios no autorizados.
• Use tokens estableciendo identidades confiables y controlando el acceso a los servicios.
• Lleve a cabo una capacitación continua de concientización sobre seguridad dentro de su equipo.
• Formalice los procesos y políticas relacionados con la seguridad y el cumplimiento.
• Proteja sus API con protección instantánea contra amenazas.

5. Análisis de API

Si desea estar por delante de su competencia y hacer crecer rápidamente su plataforma, necesita los datos correctos para tomar decisiones informadas. Los análisis de API son valiosos en toda la organización, incluidos los propietarios de productos, el éxito del cliente, el marketing y las ventas. Tales análisis están diseñados para capturar una amplia gama de métricas para uso de varios equipos.

El análisis de datos puede descubrir relaciones entre varios componentes y resaltar dónde existen patrones. El análisis de API se puede utilizar para describir, diagnosticar o predecir patrones en los datos. Luego, los equipos pueden usar esta información para administrar los niveles de servicio, establecer controles, configurar políticas de seguridad y analizar tendencias. Estos análisis pueden usarse para resolver problemas comerciales del mundo real que tienen un impacto significativo en la organización.

Conclusión

El aumento de la demanda de sistemas conectados aumenta la importancia de la industria global de API. Las API pueden proporcionar información empresarial valiosa y mejorar la eficiencia empresarial. Mirando las tendencias que dan forma al futuro mercado de las API, podemos decir que con la rápida evolución de las API, los desarrolladores deben estar atentos a las últimas tendencias en el espacio. Al mismo tiempo, las organizaciones deberán comenzar a invertir en el desarrollo de API para hacer avanzar su negocio.

Fuente: https://nordicapis.com/5-api-trends-to-look-forward-to-in-2022/

#api 

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Top 10 API Security Threats Every API Team Should Know

As more and more data is exposed via APIs either as API-first companies or for the explosion of single page apps/JAMStack, API security can no longer be an afterthought. The hard part about APIs is that it provides direct access to large amounts of data while bypassing browser precautions. Instead of worrying about SQL injection and XSS issues, you should be concerned about the bad actor who was able to paginate through all your customer records and their data.

Typical prevention mechanisms like Captchas and browser fingerprinting won’t work since APIs by design need to handle a very large number of API accesses even by a single customer. So where do you start? The first thing is to put yourself in the shoes of a hacker and then instrument your APIs to detect and block common attacks along with unknown unknowns for zero-day exploits. Some of these are on the OWASP Security API list, but not all.

Insecure pagination and resource limits

Most APIs provide access to resources that are lists of entities such as /users or /widgets. A client such as a browser would typically filter and paginate through this list to limit the number items returned to a client like so:

First Call: GET /items?skip=0&take=10 
Second Call: GET /items?skip=10&take=10

However, if that entity has any PII or other information, then a hacker could scrape that endpoint to get a dump of all entities in your database. This could be most dangerous if those entities accidently exposed PII or other sensitive information, but could also be dangerous in providing competitors or others with adoption and usage stats for your business or provide scammers with a way to get large email lists. See how Venmo data was scraped

A naive protection mechanism would be to check the take count and throw an error if greater than 100 or 1000. The problem with this is two-fold:

1. For data APIs, legitimate customers may need to fetch and sync a large number of records such as via cron jobs. Artificially small pagination limits can force your API to be very chatty decreasing overall throughput. Max limits are to ensure memory and scalability requirements are met (and prevent certain DDoS attacks), not to guarantee security.
2. This offers zero protection to a hacker that writes a simple script that sleeps a random delay between repeated accesses.

skip = 0
while True:    response = requests.post('https://api.acmeinc.com/widgets?take=10&skip=' + skip),                      headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer' + ' ' + sys.argv[1]})    print("Fetched 10 items")    sleep(randint(100,1000))    skip += 10

How to secure against pagination attacks

To secure against pagination attacks, you should track how many items of a single resource are accessed within a certain time period for each user or API key rather than just at the request level. By tracking API resource access at the user level, you can block a user or API key once they hit a threshold such as “touched 1,000,000 items in a one hour period”. This is dependent on your API use case and can even be dependent on their subscription with you. Like a Captcha, this can slow down the speed that a hacker can exploit your API, like a Captcha if they have to create a new user account manually to create a new API key.

Insecure API key generation

Most APIs are protected by some sort of API key or JWT (JSON Web Token). This provides a natural way to track and protect your API as API security tools can detect abnormal API behavior and block access to an API key automatically. However, hackers will want to outsmart these mechanisms by generating and using a large pool of API keys from a large number of users just like a web hacker would use a large pool of IP addresses to circumvent DDoS protection.

How to secure against API key pools

The easiest way to secure against these types of attacks is by requiring a human to sign up for your service and generate API keys. Bot traffic can be prevented with things like Captcha and 2-Factor Authentication. Unless there is a legitimate business case, new users who sign up for your service should not have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Instead, only trusted customers should have the ability to generate API keys programmatically. Go one step further and ensure any anomaly detection for abnormal behavior is done at the user and account level, not just for each API key.

Accidental key exposure

APIs are used in a way that increases the probability credentials are leaked:

1. APIs are expected to be accessed over indefinite time periods, which increases the probability that a hacker obtains a valid API key that’s not expired. You save that API key in a server environment variable and forget about it. This is a drastic contrast to a user logging into an interactive website where the session expires after a short duration.
2. The consumer of an API has direct access to the credentials such as when debugging via Postman or CURL. It only takes a single developer to accidently copy/pastes the CURL command containing the API key into a public forum like in GitHub Issues or Stack Overflow.
3. API keys are usually bearer tokens without requiring any other identifying information. APIs cannot leverage things like one-time use tokens or 2-factor authentication.

If a key is exposed due to user error, one may think you as the API provider has any blame. However, security is all about reducing surface area and risk. Treat your customer data as if it’s your own and help them by adding guards that prevent accidental key exposure.

How to prevent accidental key exposure

The easiest way to prevent key exposure is by leveraging two tokens rather than one. A refresh token is stored as an environment variable and can only be used to generate short lived access tokens. Unlike the refresh token, these short lived tokens can access the resources, but are time limited such as in hours or days.

The customer will store the refresh token with other API keys. Then your SDK will generate access tokens on SDK init or when the last access token expires. If a CURL command gets pasted into a GitHub issue, then a hacker would need to use it within hours reducing the attack vector (unless it was the actual refresh token which is low probability)

Exposure to DDoS attacks

APIs open up entirely new business models where customers can access your API platform programmatically. However, this can make DDoS protection tricky. Most DDoS protection is designed to absorb and reject a large number of requests from bad actors during DDoS attacks but still need to let the good ones through. This requires fingerprinting the HTTP requests to check against what looks like bot traffic. This is much harder for API products as all traffic looks like bot traffic and is not coming from a browser where things like cookies are present.

Stopping DDoS attacks

The magical part about APIs is almost every access requires an API Key. If a request doesn’t have an API key, you can automatically reject it which is lightweight on your servers (Ensure authentication is short circuited very early before later middleware like request JSON parsing). So then how do you handle authenticated requests? The easiest is to leverage rate limit counters for each API key such as to handle X requests per minute and reject those above the threshold with a 429 HTTP response. There are a variety of algorithms to do this such as leaky bucket and fixed window counters.

Incorrect server security

APIs are no different than web servers when it comes to good server hygiene. Data can be leaked due to misconfigured SSL certificate or allowing non-HTTPS traffic. For modern applications, there is very little reason to accept non-HTTPS requests, but a customer could mistakenly issue a non HTTP request from their application or CURL exposing the API key. APIs do not have the protection of a browser so things like HSTS or redirect to HTTPS offer no protection.

How to ensure proper SSL

Test your SSL implementation over at Qualys SSL Test or similar tool. You should also block all non-HTTP requests which can be done within your load balancer. You should also remove any HTTP headers scrub any error messages that leak implementation details. If your API is used only by your own apps or can only be accessed server-side, then review Authoritative guide to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing for REST APIs

Incorrect caching headers

APIs provide access to dynamic data that’s scoped to each API key. Any caching implementation should have the ability to scope to an API key to prevent cross-pollution. Even if you don’t cache anything in your infrastructure, you could expose your customers to security holes. If a customer with a proxy server was using multiple API keys such as one for development and one for production, then they could see cross-pollinated data.

#api management #api security #api best practices #api providers #security analytics #api management policies #api access tokens #api access #api security risks #api access keys

Public ASX100 APIs: The Essential List

We’ve conducted some initial research into the public APIs of the ASX100 because we regularly have conversations about what others are doing with their APIs and what best practices look like. Being able to point to good local examples and explain what is happening in Australia is a key part of this conversation.

Method

The method used for this initial research was to obtain a list of the ASX100 (as of 18 September 2020). Then work through each company looking at the following:

1. Whether the company had a public API: this was found by googling “[company name] API” and “[company name] API developer” and “[company name] developer portal”. Sometimes the company’s website was navigated or searched.
2. Some data points about the API were noted, such as the URL of the portal/documentation and the method they used to publish the API (portal, documentation, web page).
3. Observations were recorded that piqued the interest of the researchers (you will find these below).
4. Other notes were made to support future research.
5. You will find a summary of the data in the infographic below.

Data

With regards to how the APIs are shared:

• Documentation is where just the Swagger/OpenAPI docs are hosted somewhere. e.g. https://api.linkgroup.com/member/docs/index
• Portal is where an interactive portal has been developed. e.g. https://dev.telstra.com/
• The web page is where the company has a single page that isn’t interactive explaining their Public APIs. e.g. https://www.bendigoadelaide.com.au/banking-products-api.asp

#api #api-development #api-analytics #apis #api-integration #api-testing #api-security #api-gateway

An API-First Approach For Designing Restful APIs | Hacker Noon

I’ve been working with Restful APIs for some time now and one thing that I love to do is to talk about APIs.

So, today I will show you how to build an API using the API-First approach and Design First with OpenAPI Specification.

First thing first, if you don’t know what’s an API-First approach means, it would be nice you stop reading this and check the blog post that I wrote to the Farfetchs blog where I explain everything that you need to know to start an API using API-First.

Preparing the ground

Before you get your hands dirty, let’s prepare the ground and understand the use case that will be developed.

Tools

If you desire to reproduce the examples that will be shown here, you will need some of those items below.

• NodeJS
• OpenAPI Specification
• Text Editor (I’ll use VSCode)
• Command Line

Use Case

To keep easy to understand, let’s use the Todo List App, it is a very common concept beyond the software development community.

#api #rest-api #openai #api-first-development #api-design #apis #restful-apis #restful-api

What Are Good Traits That Make Great API Product Managers

As more companies realize the benefits of an API-first mindset and treating their APIs as products, there is a growing need for good API product management practices to make a company’s API strategy a reality. However, API product management is a relatively new field with little established knowledge on what is API product management and what a PM should be doing to ensure their API platform is successful.

Many of the current practices of API product management have carried over from other products and platforms like web and mobile, but API products have their own unique set of challenges due to the way they are marketed and used by customers. While it would be rare for a consumer mobile app to have detailed developer docs and a developer relations team, you’ll find these items common among API product-focused companies. A second unique challenge is that APIs are very developer-centric and many times API PMs are engineers themselves. Yet, this can cause an API or developer program to lose empathy for what their customers actually want if good processes are not in place. Just because you’re an engineer, don’t assume your customers will want the same features and use cases that you want.

This guide lays out what is API product management and some of the things you should be doing to be a good product manager.

#api #analytics #apis #product management #api best practices #api platform #api adoption #product managers #api product #api metrics

54% of Developers Cite Lack of Documentation as the Top Obstacle to Consuming APIs

Recently, I worked with my team at Postman to field the 2020 State of the API survey and report. We’re insanely grateful to the folks who participated—more than 13,500 developers and other professionals took the survey, helping make this the largest and most comprehensive survey in the industry. (Seriously folks, thank you!) Curious what we learned? Here are a few insights in areas that you might find interesting:

API Reliability

Whether internal, external, or partner, APIs are perceived as reliable—more than half of respondents stated that APIs do not break, stop working, or materially change specification often enough to matter. Respondents choosing the “not often enough to matter” option here came in at 55.8% for internal APIs, 60.4% for external APIs, and 61.2% for partner APIs.

Obstacles to Producing APIs

When asked about the biggest obstacles to producing APIs, lack of time is by far the leading obstacle, with 52.3% of respondents listing it. Lack of knowledge (36.4%) and people (35.1%) were the next highest.

#api #rest-api #apis #api-first-development #api-report #api-documentation #api-reliability #hackernoon-top-story