API with NestJS #31. Two-factor Authentication

• 1.  API with NestJS #1. Controllers, routing and the module structure
• 2.  API with NestJS #2. Setting up a PostgreSQL database with TypeORM
• 3.  API with NestJS #3. Authenticating users with bcrypt, Passport, JWT, and cookies
• 4.  API with NestJS #4. Error handling and data validation
• 5.  API with NestJS #5. Serializing the response with interceptors
• 6.  API with NestJS #6. Looking into dependency injection and modules
• 7.  API with NestJS #7. Creating relationships with Postgres and TypeORM
• 8.  API with NestJS #8. Writing unit tests
• 9.  API with NestJS #9. Testing services and controllers with integration tests
• 10.  API with NestJS #10. Uploading public files to Amazon S3
• 11.  API with NestJS #11. Managing private files with Amazon S3
• 12.  API with NestJS #12. Introduction to Elasticsearch
• 13.  API with NestJS #13. Implementing refresh tokens using JWT
• 14.  API with NestJS #14. Improving performance of our Postgres database with indexes
• 15.  API with NestJS #15. Defining transactions with PostgreSQL and TypeORM
• 16.  API with NestJS #16. Using the array data type with PostgreSQL and TypeORM
• 17.  API with NestJS #17. Offset and keyset pagination with PostgreSQL and TypeORM
• 18.  API with NestJS #18. Exploring the idea of microservices
• 19.  API with NestJS #19. Using RabbitMQ to communicate with microservices
• 20.  API with NestJS #20. Communicating with microservices using the gRPC framework
• 21.  API with NestJS #21. An introduction to CQRS
• 22.  API with NestJS #22. Storing JSON with PostgreSQL and TypeORM
• 23.  API with NestJS #23. Implementing in-memory cache to increase the performance
• 24.  API with NestJS #24. Cache with Redis. Running the app in a Node.js cluster
• 25.  API with NestJS #25. Sending scheduled emails with cron and Nodemailer
• 26.  API with NestJS #26. Real-time chat with WebSockets
• 27.  API with NestJS #27. Introduction to GraphQL. Queries, mutations, and authentication
• 28.  API with NestJS #28. Dealing in the N + 1 problem in GraphQL
• 29.  API with NestJS #29. Real-time updates with GraphQL subscriptions
• 30.  API with NestJS #30. Scalar types in GraphQL
• 31. API with NestJS #31. Two-factor authentication

While developing our application, security should be one of our main concerns. One of the ways we can improve it is by implementing a two-factor authentication mechanism. This article goes through its principles and puts them into practice with NestJS and Google Authenticator.

Adding two-factor authentication

The core idea behind two-factor authentication is to confirm the user’s identity in two ways. There is an important distinction between two-step authentication and two-factor authentication. A common example is with the ATM. To use it, we need both a credit card and a PIN code. We call it a two-factor authentication because it requires both something we have and something we know. For example, requiring a password and a PIN code could be called a two-step flow instead.

#javascript #nestjs #typescript

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How To Set Up Two-Factor Authentication in cPanel

What is 2FA
Two-Factor Authentication (or 2FA as it often referred to) is an extra layer of security that is used to provide users an additional level of protection when securing access to an account.
Employing a 2FA mechanism is a vast improvement in security over the Singe-Factor Authentication method of simply employing a username and password. Using this method, accounts that have 2FA enabled, require the user to enter a one-time passcode that is generated by an external application. The 2FA passcode (usually a six-digit number) is required to be input into the passcode field before access is granted. The 2FA input is usually required directly after the username and password are entered by the client.

#tutorials #2fa #access #account security #authentication #authentication method #authentication token #cli #command line #cpanel #feature manager #google authenticator #one time password #otp #otp authentication #passcode #password #passwords #qr code #security #security code #security policy #security practices #single factor authentication #time-based one-time password #totp #two factor authentication #whm

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

Laravel 8 REST API Authentication with Passport Example Tutorial

Laravel 8 rest api authentication with passport tutorial, you will learn step by step how to create rest API with laravel 8 passport authentication. And as well as how to install and cofigure passport auth in laravel 8 app.

Laravel 8 API Authentication with Passport Tutorial

Step 1: Download Laravel 8 App
Step 2: Database Configuration
Step 3: Install Passport Auth
Step 4: Passport Configuration
Step 5: Run Migration
Step 6: Create APIs Route
Step 7: Create Passport Auth Controller
Step 8: Now Test Laravel REST API in Postman

https://www.tutsmake.com/laravel-8-rest-api-authentication-with-passport/

#laravel api authentication with passport #laravel 8 api authentication #laravel 8 api authentication token tutorial #laravel 8 api authentication using passport #laravel 8 api authentication session

API Integration Practices and Patterns

We all hear it so often that we almost stop hearing it: “Integration is critical to meeting users’ needs.”

Integration work consumes 50%-80% of the time and budget of digital transformation projects, or building a digital platform, while innovation gets only the leftovers, according to SAP and Salesforce. And as everyone from legacy enterprises to SaaS startups launches new digital products, they all hit a point at which the product cannot unlock more value for users or continue to grow without making integration a feature.

If I were to sum up the one question behind all of the other questions that I hear from customers, enterprises, partners, and developers, it would be something like: “Is integration a differentiator that we should own? Or an undifferentiated but necessary feature that supports what we’re trying to accomplish?”

This Refcard won’t try to answer that question for you. Rather, no matter what type of development work you do, API integration is a fact of life today, like gravity. Why? Today, experience is paramount. The average enterprise uses more than 1,500 cloud applications (with the number growing by 20% each year). Every app needs to integrate with other systems in a fluid and ever-changing application ecosystem. So instead, I’ll share some of the common practices you’re likely to contend with as well as some patterns to consider.

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This is a preview of the API Integrations Practices and Patterns Refcard. To read the entire Refcard, please download the PDF from the link above.

#apis #api integration #integration patterns #api cloud #api patterns #api authentication #api errors #apis and integrations