Tools To Work with Amazon API Gateway, Swagger, and RAML

Amazon API Gateway Importer

The Amazon API Gateway Importer lets you create or update Amazon API Gateway APIs from a Swagger or RAML API representation.

To learn more about API Gateway, please see the service documentation or the API documentation.

Updates

April 5, 2016: Swagger/OpenAPI import is now generally available in the API Gateway REST API, the AWS CLI and all AWS SDKs. You can also import and export Swagger definitions using the API Gateway console. This release addresses many of the open issues and feedback in this repository.

Customers are encouraged to migrate their workflow to the standard AWS tools. aws-apigateway-importer will receive minimal support from the API Gateway team going forward. Pull requests will be periodically reviewed. Customers using RAML definitions should continue to use aws-apigateway-importer for the time being.

Thanks for all of your feedback and contributions to this tool. Any feedback or issues going forward should be directed to the official API Gateway forums. - @rpgreen

Usage

Prerequisites

Credentials

This tool requires AWS credentials to be configured in at least one of the locations specified by the default credential provider chain.

It will look for configured credentials in environment variables, Java system properties, AWS SDK/CLI profile credentials, and EC2 instance profile credentials.

Build

Build with mvn assembly:assembly

Import a new API

./aws-api-import.sh --create path/to/swagger.json

./aws-api-import.sh -c path/to/api.raml

Update an existing API and deploy it to a stage

./aws-api-import.sh --update API_ID --deploy STAGE_NAME path/to/swagger.yaml

./aws-api-import.sh --update API_ID --deploy STAGE_NAME --raml-config path/to/config.json path/to/api.raml

For Windows environments replace ./aws-api-import.sh with ./aws-api-import.cmd in the examples.

API Gateway Extension Example

You can fully define an API Gateway API in Swagger using the x-amazon-apigateway-auth and x-amazon-apigateway-integration extensions, or in RAML using an external configuration file.

Defined on an Operation:

"x-amazon-apigateway-auth" : {
    "type" : "aws_iam"
},
"x-amazon-apigateway-integration" : {
   "type" : "aws",
   "uri" : "arn:aws:apigateway:us-east-1:lambda:path/2015-03-31/functions/arn:aws:lambda:us-east-1:MY_ACCT_ID:function:helloWorld/invocations",
   "httpMethod" : "POST",
   "credentials" : "arn:aws:iam::MY_ACCT_ID:role/lambda_exec_role",
   "requestTemplates" : {
       "application/json" : "json request template 2",
       "application/xml" : "xml request template 2"
   },
   "requestParameters" : {
       "integration.request.path.integrationPathParam" : "method.request.querystring.latitude",
       "integration.request.querystring.integrationQueryParam" : "method.request.querystring.longitude"
   },
   "cacheNamespace" : "cache-namespace",
   "cacheKeyParameters" : [],
   "responses" : {
       "2\\d{2}" : {
           "statusCode" : "200",
           "responseParameters" : {
               "method.response.header.test-method-response-header" : "integration.response.header.integrationResponseHeaderParam1"
           },
           "responseTemplates" : {
               "application/json" : "json 200 response template",
               "application/xml" : "xml 200 response template"
           }
       },
       "default" : {
           "statusCode" : "400",
           "responseParameters" : {
               "method.response.header.test-method-response-header" : "'static value'"
           },
           "responseTemplates" : {
               "application/json" : "json 400 response template",
               "application/xml" : "xml 400 response template"
           }
       }
   }
}

Testing

mvn test

---

Author: amazon-archives
Source code: https://github.com/amazon-archives/aws-apigateway-importer
License: Apache-2.0 license

#aws 

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

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

A Simple Guide to API Development Tools

APIs can be as simple as 1 endpoint for use by 100s of users or as complex as the AWS APIs with 1000s of endpoints and 100s of thousands of users. Building them can mean spending a couple of hours using a low-code platform or months of work using a multitude of tools. Hosting them can be as simple as using one platform that does everything we need or as complex as setting up and managing ingress control, security, caching, failover, metrics, scaling etc.

What they all have in common are three basic steps to go from nothing to a running API.

Each of these steps has its own set of tools. Here are some I’ve used and popular alternatives.

Design

REST is the most popular API interface and has the best tooling. Our design output for REST services always includes an OpenAPI specification. The specification language can be tricky to get right in JSON (how many curly brackets?) or YAML (how many spaces?) so a good editor saves a lot of time.

Four popular ones are:

• Swagger
• Postman
• Insomnia
• Stoplight

I’ve only used Swagger and Postman but both Insomnia and Stoplight look interesting. All of them offer additional functionality like documentation, testing and collaboration so are much more than just specification generators.

#api #apis #api-development #restful-api #rest-api #development-tools #app-development-tools #developer-tools

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

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

API Tools for Every Phase of the API Lifecycle

When you set out to build your first API, it can very well be that you are either overwhelmed or forget essential points. The ecosystem for API tools is vast, and it’s vital to get the right tool for every phase of your project.

In this article, we will go through the different phases an API project usually has. For every phase, I will list the significant points and tools that help there.

Build Phase

The first phase is the build phase. It’s defined by major decisions we have to make before we start implementing and later the actual implementation of our API. We have to ask what type of API we want to build. Is it RPC or REST? Do we have to push updates to the users in real-time, or can we get away with a pull-based approach?

Depending on the requirements our use-cases have, we have to choose technology that fits. On the other hand, we also have to keep an eye on our developer’s skillset; if we select tech nobody can handle, we won’t build anything good.

Design

Design tools can help us with planning our API and even generating common parts of it. They force us to follow best practices, so even less-skilled personnel can build secure and performant APIs.

Usual API design tools include:

• OpenAPI
• Apiary.io
• IBM API Connect
• Cloud API Designer
• Stoplight Studio

Also, a side note, before using the tools it is important to understand API design patterns. Learn more.

Mockup

Mockup libraries are another part of the toolbelt. They can be used for testing and help client implementers to start building before the actual API is ready.

#api #analytics #heroku #openapi #postman #tooling #api lifecycle #api monitoring #api tools #runscope