Best Practice Guide For Rest API Security

What is the Rest API?

RESTful programming provides stateless and a uniform interface, Rest API is HTTP-based URLs that hide the back-end infrastructure from the user. Rest APIs provide the back end for modern web and mobile applications.

Why is API security important?

Rest APIs are the most important layer in the back-end infrastructure for most modern applications. Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting APIs. Ensuring web API security is the most important and crucial. Let’s see what you can do to ensure REST API security.

Common Security Vulnerabilities & Mistakes and Best Practices to Secure REST APIs

Always Use HTTPS

API security start with Http Connection. All requests from clients to your API should be encrypted (HTTPS). Unfortunately, many client HTTP do not enable HTTPS/secure connections by default it’s necessary to enforce that from the server. When Clients who attempt to connect via HTTP should forcefully be redirected to secure HTTPS connections.

You can get a free certificate with Let’s Encrypt. SSL provides security from basic API vulnerabilities with almost minimal effort

Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS)

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a targeted cyber attack on a web site or device where a malicious attacker flood of traffic is sent from single or multiple sources. the main purpose of DDos is to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its genuine users by temporarily or disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet. if we are not using appropriate security practice or tools then it makes RESTful API into a non-functional situation.

####### How to Prevent or Stop DDoS Attacks

API DoS attacks are more common these days. Rest APIs utilizations also increasing day-by-day. The organization’s dependency is increasing day-by-day because of business needed a unified platform. An attacker can use multiple ways for the DDoS attack so as developer or security engineer you need to implement long-term solution not a temporary

Rate Limit

Attackers can make so many repeated calls on the APIs. it can make resources unavailable to its genuine users. A rate limit is the number of API calls an app or user can make within a given period. When this limit is exceeded, block API access temporarily and return the 429 (too many requests) HTTP error code.

#restapi #rest api #rest api security #best practice #rest api developer guide #security

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

Best Practice Guide For Rest API Security

What is the Rest API?

RESTful programming provides stateless and a uniform interface, Rest API is HTTP-based URLs that hide the back-end infrastructure from the user. Rest APIs provide the back end for modern web and mobile applications.

Why is API security important?

Rest APIs are the most important layer in the back-end infrastructure for most modern applications. Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting APIs. Ensuring web API security is the most important and crucial. Let’s see what you can do to ensure REST API security.

Common Security Vulnerabilities & Mistakes and Best Practices to Secure REST APIs

Always Use HTTPS

API security start with Http Connection. All requests from clients to your API should be encrypted (HTTPS). Unfortunately, many client HTTP do not enable HTTPS/secure connections by default it’s necessary to enforce that from the server. When Clients who attempt to connect via HTTP should forcefully be redirected to secure HTTPS connections.

You can get a free certificate with Let’s Encrypt. SSL provides security from basic API vulnerabilities with almost minimal effort

Distributed Denial of Service Attacks (DDoS)

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a targeted cyber attack on a web site or device where a malicious attacker flood of traffic is sent from single or multiple sources. the main purpose of DDos is to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its genuine users by temporarily or disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet. if we are not using appropriate security practice or tools then it makes RESTful API into a non-functional situation.

####### How to Prevent or Stop DDoS Attacks

API DoS attacks are more common these days. Rest APIs utilizations also increasing day-by-day. The organization’s dependency is increasing day-by-day because of business needed a unified platform. An attacker can use multiple ways for the DDoS attack so as developer or security engineer you need to implement long-term solution not a temporary

Rate Limit

Attackers can make so many repeated calls on the APIs. it can make resources unavailable to its genuine users. A rate limit is the number of API calls an app or user can make within a given period. When this limit is exceeded, block API access temporarily and return the 429 (too many requests) HTTP error code.

#restapi #rest api #rest api security #best practice #rest api developer guide #security

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

Security Best Practices for REST APIs

In the modern era, REST APIs become an integral part of the applications. By adopting the REST APIs, you can expose your services to web applications or mobile applications and all other digital platforms.

REST APIs must be built as a stateless service. REST API best practices deserve a separate article. This article primarily focuses only on security best practices for REST APIs.

Below are the key concepts that should be considered while designing the REST APIs.

• Authentication/authorization
• Input validations and sanitization
• Defining content-types
• Output encoding
• Rate limiters
• Security for data in transit and storage
• Responding with appropriate status codes to avoid the ambiguity

Before delving into details let us first understand authentication and authorization.

• Authentication: Authentication is the process of identifying whether the credentials passed along with the request are valid or not. here credentials can be passed as user id and password or a token assigned for the user session.
• Authorization: Authorization is the process of identifying whether the received request is allowed to access the requested endpoint or method.

In the request processing pipeline, authentication comes first and authorization comes next. Authorization occurs only after successful authentication of the request.

Below are the most widely used authentication types when dealing with Remote APIs (REST APIs / Web Services).

Basic Auth is the simplest way of dealing with Authentication when compared to other methodologies.

In the Basic Auth, the user has to send the user id and password in the format of userid:password encoded in base64 format. This method is preferred only over the https protocol only. This is highly discouraged to use over HTTP as your credentials are transferring in plain format.

Plain Text

1

Authorization: Basic base64(userid:password)

Bearer Token Authentication is also known as Token-based Authentication. When the user logs into an application using the credentials, the Authorization server generates a cryptographic token to uniquely identifies the user. the applications can use the token to identify the user after a successful login. i.e. The application is required to send this token when accessing protected resources.

Similar to Basic Authentication, Bearer tokens are only recommended to send over HTTPS only.

Authorization Bearer <your token>API Tokens are widely used in the web services/REST APIs security before the evaluation of Client-side frameworks. Still, many organizations use the API Tokens as a security measure for the APIs. This is the simplest way of implementing the security in REST APIs.

This is recommended when providing the communication between server to server requests. It is recommended to use the IP Address registration as well when using the API keys. i.e. API Token is uniquely identified along with the IP Address. This is not recommended to use as a methodology for end-user authentication and Authorization.

The API Key key can be sent as part of the query string or _Authorization token _or custom header or as part of the data.

OAuth2.0 is an authorization framework that allows users to grant a third-party website or application to access the user’s protected resources without revealing their credentials or identity. For that purpose, an OAuth 2.0 server issues access tokens that the client applications can use to access protected resources on behalf of the resource owner.

You probably see this option in the form of ‘Login using Google’, ‘Login using Facebook’, ‘Login using Github’ etc.

By default, OAuth generates the access tokens in the format of JWT (JSON web tokens). JWTs contain three parts: a header, a payload, and a signature.

• Header: metadata about the token like cryptographic algorithms used to generate the token.
• Payload: payload contains the Subject (usually identifier of the user), claims (also known as permissions or grants), and other information like audience and expiration time, etc.
• Signature: used to validate the token is trustworthy and has not been tampered with.
• Below are the OAuth roles you must aware of when dealing OAuth2.0
• Resource Owner: the entity that can grant access to a protected resource. Typically this is the end-user.
• Resource Server: The server that is hosting the protected resources
• Client: the app requesting access to a protected resource on behalf of the Resource Owner.
• Authorization Server: the server that authenticates the Resource Owner, and issues Access Tokens after getting proper authorization.

OAuth2.0 provides various flows or grant types suitable for different types of API clients. Grant Types are out of scope for this article.

OIDC is a simple identity layer built on top of the OAuth2.0. OIDC defines a sign-in flow that enables a client application to authenticate a user, and to obtain information (or “claims”) about that user, such as the user name, email, and so on. User identity information is encoded in a secure JSON Web Token (JWT), called ID token.

In the Open ID Connect, Request flow will happen as below.

1. user will be navigated to the Authorization server from the client app
2. The user enters the credentials to identify the user
3. Upon successful authentication, Server sends back the user to client along with authorization code
4. Client app requests the Authorization server for tokens (Access Token and Id Token) using the authorization code (we can use nonce here to incorporated additional security)
5. Authorization server responds back with tokens.

Input validation should be applied to both syntactical and semantic levels.

• **Syntactical: **should enforce correct syntax of structured fields (e.g. SSN, date, currency symbol).
• **Semantic: **should enforce correctness of their values in the specific business context (e.g. start date is before the end date, price is within expected range).

Basic Input validation guidelines

• Define an implicit input validation by using strong types like numbers, booleans, dates, times, or fixed data ranges in API parameters.
• Constrain string inputs with regular expressions.
• Use whitelisting and blacklisting techniques
• Define min and maximum lengths as a mandatory
• Enforce Input validations on client-side and server-side
• Reject unexpected/illegal content with valid error messages

We must define the allowed content types explicitly. It is always good practice to define the valid content types and share them with the required shareholders. Upon receiving an unexpected or missing content-type header, API must respond with HTTP response status 406 Unacceptable or 415 Unsupported Media Type.

Content of given resources must be interpreted correctly by the browser, the server should always send the Content-Type header with the correct Content-Type, and preferably the Content-Type header should include a charset.

JSON encoders must be used when dealing with JSON Data.

Rate limiters allow you to secure your APIs from the DDoS attacks. When exposing your API to publicly you must define the rate limiters. If you are opt-in for any cloud provider tools, they explicitly provide the rate-limiting capabilities to the public faced resources. you must adjust the configurations accordingly to your needs.

Ensure data is sent over HTTPS only. if any user tries to access over HTTP, you should upgrade it HTTPS and handle the request

Data in storage must be protected using best security practices. All the cloud providers provide you the inbuilt security (Encryption)for your backups.

Below are few common status codes used along with REST APIs

• 201 - Created
• 200 - OK
• 202 - Accepted and queued for processing
• 204 - No Content
• 304 - Not Modified
• 400 - Bad Request
• 401 - UnAuthorized
• 403 - Forbidden
• 404 - Not Found
• 405 - Method Not Allowed
• 406 - Not Acceptable (Used with Content Types)
• 415 - Unsupported Media Type
• 429 - Two Many requests

Please share your thoughts in the comments box to improve it further.

If you found this helpful please share it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and your favorite forums. Big thanks for reading!

#rest api #microservice architecture #api security #security best practices #rest api security #architecture and design

Procedure To Become An Air Hostess/Cabin Crew

Minimum educational required – 10+2 passed in any stream from a recognized board.

The age limit is 18 to 25 years. It may differ from one airline to another!

 

Physical and Medical standards –

• Females must be 157 cm in height and males must be 170 cm in height (for males). This parameter may vary from one airline toward the next.
• The candidate's body weight should be proportional to his or her height.
• Candidates with blemish-free skin will have an advantage.
• Physical fitness is required of the candidate.
• Eyesight requirements: a minimum of 6/9 vision is required. Many airlines allow applicants to fix their vision to 20/20!
• There should be no history of mental disease in the candidate's past.
• The candidate should not have a significant cardiovascular condition.

You can become an air hostess if you meet certain criteria, such as a minimum educational level, an age limit, language ability, and physical characteristics.

As can be seen from the preceding information, a 10+2 pass is the minimal educational need for becoming an air hostess in India. So, if you have a 10+2 certificate from a recognized board, you are qualified to apply for an interview for air hostess positions!

You can still apply for this job if you have a higher qualification (such as a Bachelor's or Master's Degree).

So That I may recommend, joining Special Personality development courses, a learning gallery that offers aviation industry courses by AEROFLY INTERNATIONAL AVIATION ACADEMY in CHANDIGARH. They provide extra sessions included in the course and conduct the entire course in 6 months covering all topics at an affordable pricing structure. They pay particular attention to each and every aspirant and prepare them according to airline criteria. So be a part of it and give your aspirations So be a part of it and give your aspirations wings.

Read More:   Safety and Emergency Procedures of Aviation || Operations of Travel and Hospitality Management || Intellectual Language and Interview Training || Premiere Coaching For Retail and Mass Communication || Introductory Cosmetology and Tress Styling  ||  Aircraft Ground Personnel Competent Course

For more information:

Visit us at:     https://aerofly.co.in

Phone         :     wa.me//+919988887551 

Address:     Aerofly International Aviation Academy, SCO 68, 4th Floor, Sector 17-D,                            Chandigarh, Pin 160017 

Email:     info@aerofly.co.in

 

#air hostess institute in Delhi, 

#air hostess institute in Chandigarh, 

#air hostess institute near me,

#best air hostess institute in India,
#air hostess institute,

#best air hostess institute in Delhi, 

#air hostess institute in India, 

#best air hostess institute in India,

#air hostess training institute fees, 

#top 10 air hostess training institute in India, 

#government air hostess training institute in India, 

#best air hostess training institute in the world,

#air hostess training institute fees, 

#cabin crew course fees, 

#cabin crew course duration and fees, 

#best cabin crew training institute in Delhi, 

#cabin crew courses after 12th,

#best cabin crew training institute in Delhi, 

#cabin crew training institute in Delhi, 

#cabin crew training institute in India,

#cabin crew training institute near me,

#best cabin crew training institute in India,

#best cabin crew training institute in Delhi, 

#best cabin crew training institute in the world, 

#government cabin crew training institute

What is REST API? An Overview | Liquid Web

What is REST?

The REST acronym is defined as a “REpresentational State Transfer” and is designed to take advantage of existing HTTP protocols when used for Web APIs. It is very flexible in that it is not tied to resources or methods and has the ability to handle different calls and data formats. Because REST API is not constrained to an XML format like SOAP, it can return multiple other formats depending on what is needed. If a service adheres to this style, it is considered a “RESTful” application. REST allows components to access and manage functions within another application.

REST was initially defined in a dissertation by Roy Fielding’s twenty years ago. He proposed these standards as an alternative to SOAP (The Simple Object Access Protocol is a simple standard for accessing objects and exchanging structured messages within a distributed computing environment). REST (or RESTful) defines the general rules used to regulate the interactions between web apps utilizing the HTTP protocol for CRUD (create, retrieve, update, delete) operations.

What is an API?

An API (or Application Programming Interface) provides a method of interaction between two systems.

What is a RESTful API?

A RESTful API (or application program interface) uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE data following the REST standards. This allows two pieces of software to communicate with each other. In essence, REST API is a set of remote calls using standard methods to return data in a specific format.

The systems that interact in this manner can be very different. Each app may use a unique programming language, operating system, database, etc. So, how do we create a system that can easily communicate and understand other apps?? This is where the Rest API is used as an interaction system.

When using a RESTful API, we should determine in advance what resources we want to expose to the outside world. Typically, the RESTful API service is implemented, keeping the following ideas in mind:

• Format: There should be no restrictions on the data exchange format
• Implementation: REST is based entirely on HTTP
• Service Definition: Because REST is very flexible, API can be modified to ensure the application understands the request/response format.
• The RESTful API focuses on resources and how efficiently you perform operations with it using HTTP.

The features of the REST API design style state:

• Each entity must have a unique identifier.
• Standard methods should be used to read and modify data.
• It should provide support for different types of resources.
• The interactions should be stateless.

For REST to fit this model, we must adhere to the following rules:

• Client-Server Architecture: The interface is separate from the server-side data repository. This affords flexibility and the development of components independently of each other.
• Detachment: The client connections are not stored on the server between requests.
• Cacheability: It must be explicitly stated whether the client can store responses.
• Multi-level: The API should work whether it interacts directly with a server or through an additional layer, like a load balancer.

#tutorials #api #application #application programming interface #crud #http #json #programming #protocols #representational state transfer #rest #rest api #rest api graphql #rest api json #rest api xml #restful #soap #xml #yaml