A Complete Api for Audio Playback and Recording with Flutter

A complete api for audio playback and recording. Audio player, audio recorder, media player, media recorder, sound player, sound recorder.

Overview

Flutter Sound is a Flutter package allowing you to play and record audio for :

• Android
• iOS
• Flutter Web

Maybe, one day, we will be supported by Linux, Macos, and even (why not) Windows. But this is not top of our priorities.

Flutter Sound provides both a high level API and widgets for:

• play audio
• record audio

Flutter Sound can be used to play a beep from an asset all the way up to implementing a complete media player.

The API is designed so you can use the supplied widgets or roll your own.

• Flutter Sound requires an iOS 10.0 SDK (or later)
• Flutter Sound requires an Android API level 21 (or later)

Features

The Flutter Sound package includes the following features

• Play and Record flutter sound or music with various codecs.
• Play local or remote files specified by their URL.
• Play assets.
• Play audio using the built in SoundPlayerUI Widget.
• Roll your own UI utilising the Flutter Sound api.
• Record audio using the builtin SoundRecorderUI Widget.
• Roll your own Recording UI utilising the Flutter Sound api.
• Support for releasing/resuming resources when the app pauses/resumes.
• Record to a Dart Stream
• Playback from a Dart Stream
• The App playback can be controled from the device lock screen or from an Apple watch

Changelog

You can find the changes here

Documentation

The documentation is here

Licenses

Flutter Sound and tau_core are copyrighted by Dooboolab (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021).

Flutter Sound and tau_core are released under a license with a copyleft clause: the MPL-V2 license. This means that if you modify some of Flutter Sound code you must publish your modifications under the MPL license too.

Tau React, Tau RCL and Tau JS are copyrighted by Canardoux (2021).

Tau React, Tau RCL and Tau JS are released under a license with a strong copyleft clause : the GPL-V3 license. This means that if you use part or all of Tau React, Tau RCL or Tau JS in your App, this App must be published under the GPL-V3 license, too.

Help

τ is a fundamental building block needed by almost every mobile project.

I'm looking to make τ the go to project for Audio with support for each of the Flutter supported platforms and for React Native.

τ is a large and complex project which requires me to maintain multiple hardware platforms and test environments.

I greatly appreciate any contributions to the project which can be as simple as providing feedback on the API or documentation.

Thanks

Too many projects to manage. I am burning out slowly. If you could help me cheer up, buy me a cup of coffee will make my life really happy and get much energy out of it. As a side effect, we will know that Flutter Sound is important for you, that you appreciate our job and that you can show it with a little money.

Use this package as a library

Depend on it

Run this command:

With Flutter:

 $ flutter pub add tau_sound

This will add a line like this to your package's pubspec.yaml (and run an implicit flutter pub get):

dependencies:
  tau_sound: ^0.0.1-alpha-9+1

Alternatively, your editor might support or flutter pub get. Check the docs for your editor to learn more.

Import it

Now in your Dart code, you can use:

import 'package:tau_sound/tau_sound.dart';

example/lib/main.dart

/*
 * Copyright 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 Dooboolab.
 *
 * This file is part of Flutter-Sound.
 *
 * Flutter-Sound is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
 * it under the terms of the Mozilla Public License version 2 (MPL2.0), as published by
 * the Mozilla organization.
 *
 * Flutter-Sound is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
 * MPL General Public License for more details.
 *
 * This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public
 * License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this
 * file, You can obtain one at https://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/.
 */

import 'package:flutter/foundation.dart' show kIsWeb;
import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
import 'demo/demo.dart';
import 'livePlaybackWithBackPressure/live_playback_with_back_pressure.dart';
import 'livePlaybackWithoutBackPressure/live_playback_without_back_pressure.dart';
import 'multi_playback/multi_playback.dart';
import 'play_from_mic/play_from_mic.dart';
import 'recordToStream/record_to_stream_example.dart';
import 'simple_playback/simple_playback.dart';
import 'simple_recorder/simple_recorder.dart';
import 'soundEffect/sound_effect.dart';
import 'streamLoop/stream_loop.dart';
import 'widgetUI/widget_ui_demo.dart';
import 'convert_to_mp3/convert_to_mp3.dart';
import 'loglevel/loglevel.dart';
import 'volume_control/volume_control.dart';
import 'speed_control/speed_control.dart';
import 'player_onProgress/player_onProgress.dart';
import 'recorder_onProgress/recorder_onProgress.dart';
import 'seek/seek.dart';
import 'streamLoop_justAudio/stream_loop_just_audio.dart';

/*
    This APP is just a driver to call the various Flutter Sound examples.
    Please refer to the examples/README.md and all the examples located under the examples/lib directory.
*/

void main() {
  runApp(ExamplesApp());
}

///
const int tNotWeb = 1;

///
class Example {
  ///
  final String? title;

  ///
  final String? subTitle;

  ///
  final String? description;

  ///
  final WidgetBuilder? route;

  ///
  final int? flags;

  ///
  /* ctor */ Example(
      {this.title, this.subTitle, this.description, this.flags, this.route});

  ///
  void go(BuildContext context) =>
      Navigator.push(context, MaterialPageRoute<void>(builder: route!));
}

///
final List<Example> exampleTable = [
  // If you update the following test, please update also the Examples/README.md file and the comment inside the dart file.

  Example(
      title: 'Demo',
      subTitle: 'Flutter Sound capabilities',
      flags: 0,
      route: (_) => Demo(),
      description:
          '''This is a Demo of what it is possible to do with Flutter Sound.
The code of this Demo app is not so simple and unfortunately not very clean :-( .

Flutter Sound beginners : you probably should look to `[SimplePlayback]`  and `[SimpleRecorder]`

The biggest interest of this Demo is that it shows most of the features of Flutter Sound :

- Plays from various media with various codecs
- Records to various media with various codecs
- Pause and Resume control from recording or playback
- Shows how to use a Stream for getting the playback (or recoding) events
- Shows how to specify a callback function when a playback is terminated,
- Shows how to record to a Stream or playback from a stream
- Can show controls on the iOS or Android lock-screen
- ...

This Demo does not make use of the Flutter Sound UI Widgets.

It would be really great if someone rewrite this demo soon'''),

  Example(
    title: 'WidgetUIDemo',
    subTitle: 'Demonstration of the UI Widget',
    flags: 0,
    route: (_) => WidgetUIDemo(),
    description:
// If you update the following test, please update also the Examples/README.md file and the comment inside the dart file.
        '''
This is a Demo of an App which uses the Flutter Sound UI Widgets.

My own feeling is that this Demo is really too much complicated for doing something very simple.
There is too many dependencies and too many sources.

I really hope that someone will write soon another simpler Demo App.
''',
  ),

  Example(
    title: 'simplePlayback',
    subTitle: 'A very simple example',
    flags: 0,
    route: (_) => SimplePlayback(),
    description: '''
This is a very simple example for Flutter Sound beginners,
that shows how to play a remote file.

This example is really basic.
''',
  ),

  Example(
    title: 'simpleRecorder',
    subTitle: 'A very simple example',
    flags: 0,
    route: (_) => SimpleRecorder(),
    description: '''
This is a very simple example for Flutter Sound beginners,
that shows how to record, and then playback a file.

This example is really basic.
''',
  ),

  Example(
    title: 'multiPlayback',
    subTitle: 'Playing several sound at the same time',
    flags: 0,
    route: (_) => MultiPlayback(),
    description: '''
This is a simple example that plays several sound at the same time.
''',
  ),

  Example(
    title: 'Volume Control',
    subTitle: 'Volume Control',
    flags: 0,
    route: (_) => VolumeControl(),
    description: '''
This is a very simple example showing how to set the Volume during a playback.

This example is really basic.
''',
  ),

  Example(
    title: 'Speed Control',
    subTitle: 'Speed Control',
    flags: 0,
    route: (_) => SpeedControl(),
    description: '''
This is a very simple example showing how tune the speed of a playback.

This example is really basic.
''',
  ),

  Example(
    title: 'Seek Player',
    subTitle: 'Seek Player',
    flags: 0,
    route: (_) => Seek(),
    description: '''
This is a very simple example showing how tune the speed of a playback.

This example is really basic.
''',
  ),

  Example(
    title: 'Player onProgress',
    subTitle: 'Player onProgress',
    flags: 0,
    route: (_) => PlayerOnProgress(),
    description: '''
This is a very simple example showing how to  call `setSubscriptionDuration() and use onProgress() on a player.

''',
  ),

  Example(
    title: 'Recorder onProgress',
    subTitle: 'Recorder onProgress',
    flags: 0,
    route: (_) => RecorderOnProgress(),
    description: '''
This is a very simple example showing how to  call `setSubscriptionDuration() and use onProgress() on a recorder.

''',
  ),

  Example(
    title: 'Play from Mic',
    subTitle: 'Play from microphone',
    flags: tNotWeb,
    route: (_) => PlayFromMic(),
    description: '''
Play on the bluetooth headset what is recorded by the microphone.
This example is very simple.

>>> Please ensure that your headset is correctly connected via bluetooth
''',
  ),

  Example(
    title: 'recordToStream',
    subTitle: 'Example of recording to Stream',
    flags: tNotWeb,
    route: (_) => RecordToStreamExample(),
    description: '''
This is an example showing how to record to a Dart Stream.
It writes all the recorded data from a Stream to a File, which is completely stupid:
if an App wants to record something to a File, it must not use Streams.

The real interest of recording to a Stream is for example to feed a Speech-to-Text engine, or for processing the Live data in Dart in real time.
''',
  ),

  Example(
    title: 'livePlaybackWithoutBackPressure',
    subTitle: 'Live Playback without BackPressure',
    flags: tNotWeb,
    route: (_) => LivePlaybackWithoutBackPressure(),
    description:
        '''A very simple example showing how to play Live Data without back pressure.
A very simple example showing how to play Live Data without back pressure.
It feeds a live stream, without waiting that the Futures are completed for each block.
This is simpler because the App does not need to await the playback for each block before playing another one.


This example get the data from an asset file, which is completely stupid :
if an App wants to play an asset file he must use "StartPlayerFromBuffer().

Feeding Flutter Sound without back pressure is very simple but you can have two problems :
- If your App is too fast feeding the audio channel, it can have problems with the Stream memory used.
- The App does not have any knowledge of when the provided block is really played.
If he does a "stopPlayer()" it will loose all the buffered data.

This example uses the ```foodEvent``` object to resynchronize the output stream before doing a ```stop()```
''',
  ),

  Example(
    title: 'livePlaybackWithBackPressure',
    subTitle: 'Live Playback with BackPressure',
    flags: tNotWeb,
    route: (_) => LivePlaybackWithBackPressure(),
    description: '''
A very simple example showing how to play Live Data with back pressure.
It feeds a live stream, waiting that the Futures are completed for each block.

This example get the data from an asset file, which is completely stupid :
if an App wants to play an asset file he must use "StartPlayerFromBuffer().

If you do not need any back pressure, you can see another simple example : "LivePlaybackWithoutBackPressure.dart".
This other example is a little bit simpler because the App does not need to await the playback for each block before
playing another one.
''',
  ),

  Example(
    title: 'soundEffect',
    subTitle: 'Sound Effect',
    flags: tNotWeb,
    route: (_) => SoundEffect(),
    description: '''
```startPlayerFromStream()``` can be very efficient to play sound effects. For example in a game App.
The App open the Audio Session and call ```startPlayerFromStream()``` during initialization.
When it want to play a noise, it has just to call the verb ```feed```
''',
  ),

  Example(
    title: 'streamLoop',
    subTitle: 'Loop from recorder to player',
    flags: tNotWeb,
    route: (_) => StreamLoop(),
    description: '''
```streamLoop()``` is a very simple example which connect the FlutterSoundRecorder sink
to the FlutterSoundPlayer Stream.

Of course, we do not play to the loudspeaker to avoid a very unpleasant Larsen effect.

This example does not use a new StreamController, but use directly `foodStreamController`
from flutter_sound_player.dart.
''',
  ),

  Example(
    title: 'convertFile',
    subTitle: 'Convert AAC to MP3',
    flags: tNotWeb,
    route: (_) => ConvertToMp3(),
    description: '''
```convertFile()``` is a very simple example
   which record an AAC audio file,
   convert this AAC file to MP3,
   and then playback the MP3 file.
''',
  ),

  Example(
    title: 'setLogLevel()',
    subTitle: 'Dynamically change the log level',
    flags: 0,
    route: (_) => LogLevel(),
    description: '''
```
Shows how to change the loglevel during an audio session.
''',
  ),

  Example(
    title: 'StreamLoopJustAudio()',
    subTitle: 'JustAudio cohabitation',
    flags: 0,
    route: (_) => StreamLoopJustAudio(),
    description: '''
    ```
    Test the StreamLoop with JustAudio cohabitation.
    ''',
  ),
];

///
class ExamplesApp extends StatelessWidget {
  // This widget is the root of your application.
  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    return MaterialApp(
      title: 'Flutter Sound Examples',
      theme: ThemeData(
        // This is the theme of your application.
        //
        // Try running your application with "flutter run". You'll see the
        // application has a blue toolbar. Then, without quitting the app, try
        // changing the primarySwatch below to Colors.green and then invoke
        // "hot reload" (press "r" in the console where you ran "flutter run",
        // or simply save your changes to "hot reload" in a Flutter IDE).
        // Notice that the counter didn't reset back to zero; the application
        // is not restarted.
        primarySwatch: Colors.blue,
        // This makes the visual density adapt to the platform that you run
        // the app on. For desktop platforms, the controls will be smaller and
        // closer together (more dense) than on mobile platforms.
        visualDensity: VisualDensity.adaptivePlatformDensity,
      ),
      home: ExamplesAppHomePage(title: 'Flutter Sound Examples'),
    );
  }
}

///
class ExamplesAppHomePage extends StatefulWidget {
  ///
  ExamplesAppHomePage({Key? key, this.title}) : super(key: key);

  // This widget is the home page of your application. It is stateful, meaning
  // that it has a State object (defined below) that contains fields that affect
  // how it looks.

  // This class is the configuration for the state. It holds the values (in this
  // case the title) provided by the parent (in this case the App widget) and
  // used by the build method of the State. Fields in a Widget subclass are
  // always marked "final".

  ///
  final String? title;

  @override
  _ExamplesHomePageState createState() => _ExamplesHomePageState();
}

class _ExamplesHomePageState extends State<ExamplesAppHomePage> {
  Example? selectedExample;

  @override
  void initState() {
    selectedExample = exampleTable[0];
    super.initState();
    //_scrollController = ScrollController( );
  }

  @override
  Widget build(BuildContext context) {
    Widget cardBuilder(BuildContext context, int index) {
      var isSelected = (exampleTable[index] == selectedExample);
      return GestureDetector(
        onTap: () => setState(() {
          selectedExample = exampleTable[index];
        }),
        child: Card(
          shape: RoundedRectangleBorder(),
          borderOnForeground: false,
          elevation: 3.0,
          child: Container(
            height: 50,
            margin: const EdgeInsets.all(3),
            padding: const EdgeInsets.all(3),
            decoration: BoxDecoration(
              color: isSelected ? Colors.indigo : Color(0xFFFAF0E6),
              border: Border.all(
                color: Colors.white,
                width: 3,
              ),
            ),

            //color: isSelected ? Colors.indigo : Colors.cyanAccent,
            child:
                Column(mainAxisAlignment: MainAxisAlignment.center, children: [
              Text(exampleTable[index].title!,
                  style: TextStyle(
                      color: isSelected ? Colors.white : Colors.black)),
              Text(exampleTable[index].subTitle!,
                  style: TextStyle(
                      color: isSelected ? Colors.white : Colors.black)),
            ]),
          ),
        ),
      );
    }

    Widget makeBody() {
      return Column(
        mainAxisAlignment: MainAxisAlignment.center,
        children: <Widget>[
          Expanded(
            child: Container(
              margin: const EdgeInsets.all(3),
              padding: const EdgeInsets.all(3),
              decoration: BoxDecoration(
                color: Color(0xFFFAF0E6),
                border: Border.all(
                  color: Colors.indigo,
                  width: 3,
                ),
              ),
              child: ListView.builder(
                  itemCount: exampleTable.length, itemBuilder: cardBuilder),
            ),
          ),
          Expanded(
            child: Container(
              margin: const EdgeInsets.all(3),
              padding: const EdgeInsets.all(3),
              decoration: BoxDecoration(
                color: Color(0xFFFAF0E6),
                border: Border.all(
                  color: Colors.indigo,
                  width: 3,
                ),
              ),
              child: SingleChildScrollView(
                child: Text(selectedExample!.description!),
              ),
            ),
          ),
        ],
      );
    }

    return Scaffold(
      backgroundColor: Colors.blue,
      appBar: AppBar(
        title: Text(widget.title!),
      ),
      body: makeBody(),
      bottomNavigationBar: BottomAppBar(
        color: Colors.blue,
        child: Container(
            margin: const EdgeInsets.all(3),
            padding: const EdgeInsets.all(3),
            height: 40,
            decoration: BoxDecoration(
              color: Color(0xFFFAF0E6),
              border: Border.all(
                color: Colors.indigo,
                width: 3,
              ),
            ),
            child: Row(
              mainAxisAlignment: MainAxisAlignment.end,
              children: [
                Text((kIsWeb && (selectedExample!.flags! & tNotWeb != 0))
                    ? 'Not supported on Flutter Web '
                    : ''),
                ElevatedButton(
                  onPressed:
                      (kIsWeb && (selectedExample!.flags! & tNotWeb != 0))
                          ? null
                          : () => selectedExample!.go(context),
                  //color: Colors.indigo,
                  child: Text(
                    'GO',
                    style: TextStyle(color: Colors.white),
                  ),
                )
              ],
            )),
      ),
    );
  }
} 

Download Details:

Author: canardoux

Source Code: https://github.com/canardoux/tau10

#flutter  #audio 

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

Google's Flutter 1.20 stable announced with new features - Navoki

Flutter Google cross-platform UI framework has released a new version 1.20 stable.

Flutter is Google’s UI framework to make apps for Android, iOS, Web, Windows, Mac, Linux, and Fuchsia OS. Since the last 2 years, the flutter Framework has already achieved popularity among mobile developers to develop Android and iOS apps. In the last few releases, Flutter also added the support of making web applications and desktop applications.

Last month they introduced the support of the Linux desktop app that can be distributed through Canonical Snap Store(Snapcraft), this enables the developers to publish there Linux desktop app for their users and publish on Snap Store.  If you want to learn how to Publish Flutter Desktop app in Snap Store that here is the tutorial.

Flutter 1.20 Framework is built on Google’s made Dart programming language that is a cross-platform language providing native performance, new UI widgets, and other more features for the developer usage.

Here are the few key points of this release:

Performance improvements for Flutter and Dart

In this release, they have got multiple performance improvements in the Dart language itself. A new improvement is to reduce the app size in the release versions of the app. Another performance improvement is to reduce junk in the display of app animation by using the warm-up phase.

If your app is junk information during the first run then the Skia Shading Language shader provides for pre-compilation as part of your app’s build. This can speed it up by more than 2x.

Added a better support of mouse cursors for web and desktop flutter app,. Now many widgets will show cursor on top of them or you can specify the type of supported cursor you want.

Autofill for mobile text fields

Autofill was already supported in native applications now its been added to the Flutter SDK. Now prefilled information stored by your OS can be used for autofill in the application. This feature will be available soon on the flutter web.

A new widget for interaction

InteractiveViewer is a new widget design for common interactions in your app like pan, zoom drag and drop for resizing the widget. Informations on this you can check more on this API documentation where you can try this widget on the DartPad. In this release, drag-drop has more features added like you can know precisely where the drop happened and get the position.

Updated Material Slider, RangeSlider, TimePicker, and DatePicker

In this new release, there are many pre-existing widgets that were updated to match the latest material guidelines, these updates include better interaction with Slider and RangeSlider, DatePicker with support for date range and time picker with the new style.

New pubspec.yaml format

Other than these widget updates there is some update within the project also like in pubspec.yaml file format. If you are a flutter plugin publisher then your old pubspec.yaml  is no longer supported to publish a plugin as the older format does not specify for which platform plugin you are making. All existing plugin will continue to work with flutter apps but you should make a plugin update as soon as possible.

Preview of embedded Dart DevTools in Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio code flutter extension got an update in this release. You get a preview of new features where you can analyze that Dev tools in your coding workspace. Enable this feature in your vs code by _dart.previewEmbeddedDevTools_setting. Dart DevTools menu you can choose your favorite page embed on your code workspace.

Network tracking

The updated the Dev tools comes with the network page that enables network profiling. You can track the timings and other information like status and content type of your** network calls** within your app. You can also monitor gRPC traffic.

Generate type-safe platform channels for platform interop

Pigeon is a command-line tool that will generate types of safe platform channels without adding additional dependencies. With this instead of manually matching method strings on platform channel and serializing arguments, you can invoke native class and pass nonprimitive data objects by directly calling the Dartmethod.

There is still a long list of updates in the new version of Flutter 1.2 that we cannot cover in this blog. You can get more details you can visit the official site to know more. Also, you can subscribe to the Navoki newsletter to get updates on these features and upcoming new updates and lessons. In upcoming new versions, we might see more new features and improvements.

You can get more free Flutter tutorials you can follow these courses:

• Setup Flutter Desktop on Windows, Linux, MacOS using VSCode and Build – Flutter Tutorial
• Flutter Desktop Linux app | Build and Publish on Snapcraft Store
• Firebase Local Emulator Suite in Flutter

#dart #developers #flutter #app developed #dart devtools in visual studio code #firebase local emulator suite in flutter #flutter autofill #flutter date picker #flutter desktop linux app build and publish on snapcraft store #flutter pigeon #flutter range slider #flutter slider #flutter time picker #flutter tutorial #flutter widget #google flutter #linux #navoki #pubspec format #setup flutter desktop on windows

What is Flutter and why you should learn it?

Flutter is an open-source UI toolkit for mobile developers, so they can use it to build native-looking** Android and iOS** applications from the same code base for both platforms. Flutter is also working to make Flutter apps for Web, PWA (progressive Web-App) and Desktop platform (Windows,macOS,Linux).

Flutter was officially released in December 2018. Since then, it has gone a much stronger flutter community.

There has been much increase in flutter developers, flutter packages, youtube tutorials, blogs, flutter examples apps, official and private events, and more. Flutter is now on top software repos based and trending on GitHub.

Flutter meaning?

What is Flutter? this question comes to many new developer’s mind.

Flutter means flying wings quickly, and lightly but obviously, this doesn’t apply in our SDK.

So Flutter was one of the companies that were acquired by **Google **for around $40 million. That company was based on providing gesture detection and recognition from a standard webcam. But later when the Flutter was going to release in alpha version for developer it’s name was Sky, but since Google already owned Flutter name, so they rename it to Flutter.

Where Flutter is used?

Flutter is used in many startup companies nowadays, and even some MNCs are also adopting Flutter as a mobile development framework. Many top famous companies are using their apps in Flutter. Some of them here are

Dream11

NuBank

Reflectly app

Abbey Road Studios

and many more other apps. Mobile development companies also adopted Flutter as a service for their clients. Even I was one of them who developed flutter apps as a freelancer and later as an IT company for mobile apps.

#dart #flutter #uncategorized #flutter framework #flutter jobs #flutter language #flutter meaning #flutter meaning in hindi #google flutter #how does flutter work #what is flutter

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