Benefits of Using the OpenAPI (Swagger) Specification for Your APIs

With software products becoming just a bunch of micro-services and third-party APIs mashed together, it’s more crucial than ever to get their structure in order.

GraphQL already did this at its inception by coming up with a whole specification that describes how APIs of its type should behave. In the RESTful API landscape, things were a bit more wild west. However, even if not all backend devs know it, there are a number of specifications for REST APIs as well.

One of the best known is the OpenAPI Spec, or OAS for short.

Enter OpenAPI

The OpenAPI specification was known as Swagger until version 3.0 was released in 2017, when it was renamed to OpenAPI. It’s a language agnostic way to describe a RESTful API, that can be used to generate code-stubs and documentation.

Its idea is to specify a REST API with a YAML document. This document can be used to generate documentation and methods for API endpoints. While APIs are generally used to decouple software, the OpenAPI spec also allows us to decouple the public interface of our API from our implementation details.

#api #rest #rest api

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APIs for Beginners - How to use an API (Full Course / Tutorial)

What is an API? Learn all about APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) in this full tutorial for beginners. You will learn what APIs do, why APIs exist, and the many benefits of APIs. APIs are used all the time in programming and web development so it is important to understand how to use them.

You will also get hands-on experience with a few popular web APIs. As long as you know the absolute basics of coding and the web, you’ll have no problem following along.
⭐️ Unit 1 - What is an API
⌨️ Video 1 - Welcome (0:00:00)
⌨️ Video 2 - Defining Interface (0:03:57)
⌨️ Video 3 - Defining API (0:07:51)
⌨️ Video 4 - Remote APIs (0:12:55)
⌨️ Video 5 - How the web works (0:17:04)
⌨️ Video 6 - RESTful API Constraint Scavenger Hunt (0:22:00)

⭐️ Unit 2 - Exploring APIs
⌨️ Video 1 - Exploring an API online (0:27:36)
⌨️ Video 2 - Using an API from the command line (0:44:30)
⌨️ Video 3 - Using Postman to explore APIs (0:53:56)
⌨️ Video 4 - Please please Mr. Postman (1:03:33)
⌨️ Video 5 - Using Helper Libraries (JavaScript) (1:14:41)
⌨️ Video 6 - Using Helper Libraries (Python) (1:24:40)

⭐️ Unit 3 - Using APIs
⌨️ Video 1 - Introducing the project (1:34:18)
⌨️ Video 2 - Flask app (1:36:07)
⌨️ Video 3 - Dealing with API Limits (1:50:00)
⌨️ Video 4 - JavaScript Single Page Application (1:54:27)
⌨️ Video 5 - Moar JavaScript and Recap (2:07:53)
⌨️ Video 6 - Review (2:18:03)
📺 The video in this post was made by freeCodeCamp.org
The origin of the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZvSYJDk-us&list=PLWKjhJtqVAblfum5WiQblKPwIbqYXkDoC&index=5
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#apis #apis for beginners #how to use an api #apis for beginners - how to use an api #application programming interfaces #learn all about apis

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

Can Your API Gateway Tango to Open API Spec?

Open API Spec — an API-First Approach

Enterprises today use an API first approach towards application development and sharing data. This API based approach is used under several scenarios like — breaking up a monolith into microservices, adopting cloud, and adopting Kubernetes.

APIs are also a popular choice to adopt Service Oriented Architectural approach. API also forms a key tenant to support data sharing and logic reuse. An API in an application can be compared to a function in the imperative programming paradigm.

Open API spec is a key mechanism for stakeholders in creating and delivering API. Often the spec forms the blue-print for defining the application, how you can access it, and who can access it. An Open API spec is a mechanism of sharing information across different roles identified in an SOA architecture — service provider, service broker, and service consumer. Each of the roles can benefit from a clear specification of API.

Delivering and Consuming Your API

The spec created in form of Open API Spec can also be used to automatically generate code for client and server. The spec itself is language agnostic and generators facilitate creating client/server in an implementation language of choice.

But delivering and consuming an API also often involves an intermediate component — the API Gateway. Often, API features like rate-limiting, authentication, and authorization, telemetry of API usage are provided by the API gateway. However, the API gateway has to be programmed for the APIs being served. This is often a time-consuming process and can also be error-prone.

What if the declarative configuration for your API gateway can be generated in the same way as your client and server from Open API spec.? This declarative configuration can then be used to program the API gateway. Still better, what if the open API spec can be ingested and used to program an API gateway. And taking it a step further, what if the open API spec can be used to program your API gateway running standalone or as Kubernetes ingress?

Open API Support in Enroute Universal API Gateway

Network infrastructure is probably one of the hardest pieces to automate when driving automation during software development. Programming an API gateway using Open API spec provides this automation capability to push automation further in an organization.

When an Open API spec is available, we can automatically program the Enroute API gateway. This kind of automation substantially increases productivity and gets rid of the error-prone manual process of configuring the API gateway. It also provides a mechanism to keep the API gateway in sync with the spec.

enroutectl: A CLI Tool to Program Enroute Universal API Gateway

We quickly show how enroutectl can be used to program the Standalone API Gateway. A similar approach can also be taken with the Enroute Kubernetes Ingress API Gateway.

Here is high-level usage for the command:

Shell

$ ./enroutectl
enroutectl can be used to generate declarative configuration for
- Enroute Standalone Gateway
- Kubernetes Ingress Gateway
enroutectl can also read openapi spec to generate config for gateway
Usage:
enroutectl [flags]
enroutectl [command]
Available Commands:
help Help about any command
init Initialize enroutectl
openapi Automatically program Enroute Universal API Gateway using OpenAPI Spec
Flags:
--enroutectl-config string config for enroutectl if no enroutectl.yaml (or enroutectl.json) found in current OR home directory
-h, --help help for enroutectl
--verbose be verbose when running
Use "enroutectl [command] --help" for more information about a command.

Run the API Gateway locally —

$ sudo docker run --net=host saarasio/enroute-gw:v0.4.0

To program locally running Enroute Standalone Gateway instance using the Petstore open API spec —

$ ./enroutectl openapi --openapi-spec petstore.json

–to-standalone-url http://localhost:1323/

Dump configuration of locally running Enroute API Gateway —

curl -s localhost:1323/proxy/dump/gw | jq

Access the Petstore application through the API Gateway —

$ curl -s -k ``[http://localhost:8080/v2/pet/](http://localhost:8080/v2/pet/)

findByStatus?status=available | wc

0 2 107446

For a more detailed description of enroutectl, refer to the article on — How to use Open API Spec to program Enroute Standalone API Gateway

#integration #api #automation #kubernetes #api gateway #swagger #openapi #api best practices #rate limiting #openapi spec