Sanitize-html Provides A Simple HTML Sanitizer with A Clear API

sanitize-html

sanitize-html provides a simple HTML sanitizer with a clear API.

sanitize-html is tolerant. It is well suited for cleaning up HTML fragments such as those created by CKEditor and other rich text editors. It is especially handy for removing unwanted CSS when copying and pasting from Word.

sanitize-html allows you to specify the tags you want to permit, and the permitted attributes for each of those tags.

If a tag is not permitted, the contents of the tag are not discarded. There are some exceptions to this, discussed below in the "Discarding the entire contents of a disallowed tag" section.

The syntax of poorly closed p and img elements is cleaned up.

href attributes are validated to ensure they only contain http, https, ftp and mailto URLs. Relative URLs are also allowed. Ditto for src attributes.

Allowing particular urls as a src to an iframe tag by filtering hostnames is also supported.

HTML comments are not preserved. Additionally, sanitize-html escapes ALL text content - this means that ampersands, greater-than, and less-than signs are converted to their equivalent HTML character references (& --> &, < --> <, and so on). Additionally, in attribute values, quotation marks are escaped as well (" --> ").

Requirements

sanitize-html is intended for use with Node.js and supports Node 10+. All of its npm dependencies are pure JavaScript. sanitize-html is built on the excellent htmlparser2 module.

Regarding TypeScript

sanitize-html is not written in TypeScript and there is no plan to directly support it. There is a community supported typing definition, @types/sanitize-html, however.

npm install -D @types/sanitize-html

If esModuleInterop=true is not set in your tsconfig.json file, you have to import it with:

import * as sanitizeHtml from 'sanitize-html';

Any questions or problems while using @types/sanitize-html should be directed to its maintainers as directed by that project's contribution guidelines.

How to use

Browser

Think first: why do you want to use it in the browser? Remember, servers must never trust browsers. You can't sanitize HTML for saving on the server anywhere else but on the server.

But, perhaps you'd like to display sanitized HTML immediately in the browser for preview. Or ask the browser to do the sanitization work on every page load. You can if you want to!

• Install the package:

npm install sanitize-html

or

yarn add sanitize-html

The primary change in the 2.x version of sanitize-html is that it no longer includes a build that is ready for browser use. Developers are expected to include sanitize-html in their project builds (e.g., webpack) as they would any other dependency. So while sanitize-html is no longer ready to link to directly in HTML, developers can now more easily process it according to their needs.

Once built and linked in the browser with other project Javascript, it can be used to sanitize HTML strings in front end code:

import sanitizeHtml from 'sanitize-html';

const html = "<strong>hello world</strong>";
console.log(sanitizeHtml(html));
console.log(sanitizeHtml("<img src=x onerror=alert('img') />"));
console.log(sanitizeHtml("console.log('hello world')"));
console.log(sanitizeHtml("<script>alert('hello world')</script>"));

Node (Recommended)

Install module from console:

npm install sanitize-html

Import the module:

// In ES modules
import sanitizeHtml from 'sanitize-html';

// Or in CommonJS
const sanitizeHtml = require('sanitize-html');

Use it in your JavaScript app:

const dirty = 'some really tacky HTML';
const clean = sanitizeHtml(dirty);

That will allow our default list of allowed tags and attributes through. It's a nice set, but probably not quite what you want. So:

// Allow only a super restricted set of tags and attributes
const clean = sanitizeHtml(dirty, {
  allowedTags: [ 'b', 'i', 'em', 'strong', 'a' ],
  allowedAttributes: {
    'a': [ 'href' ]
  },
  allowedIframeHostnames: ['www.youtube.com']
});

Boom!

Default options

allowedTags: [
  "address", "article", "aside", "footer", "header", "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4",
  "h5", "h6", "hgroup", "main", "nav", "section", "blockquote", "dd", "div",
  "dl", "dt", "figcaption", "figure", "hr", "li", "main", "ol", "p", "pre",
  "ul", "a", "abbr", "b", "bdi", "bdo", "br", "cite", "code", "data", "dfn",
  "em", "i", "kbd", "mark", "q", "rb", "rp", "rt", "rtc", "ruby", "s", "samp",
  "small", "span", "strong", "sub", "sup", "time", "u", "var", "wbr", "caption",
  "col", "colgroup", "table", "tbody", "td", "tfoot", "th", "thead", "tr"
],
disallowedTagsMode: 'discard',
allowedAttributes: {
  a: [ 'href', 'name', 'target' ],
  // We don't currently allow img itself by default, but this
  // would make sense if we did. You could add srcset here,
  // and if you do the URL is checked for safety
  img: [ 'src' ]
},
// Lots of these won't come up by default because we don't allow them
selfClosing: [ 'img', 'br', 'hr', 'area', 'base', 'basefont', 'input', 'link', 'meta' ],
// URL schemes we permit
allowedSchemes: [ 'http', 'https', 'ftp', 'mailto', 'tel' ],
allowedSchemesByTag: {},
allowedSchemesAppliedToAttributes: [ 'href', 'src', 'cite' ],
allowProtocolRelative: true,
enforceHtmlBoundary: false

Common use cases

"I like your set but I want to add one more tag. Is there a convenient way?"

Sure:

const clean = sanitizeHtml(dirty, {
  allowedTags: sanitizeHtml.defaults.allowedTags.concat([ 'img' ])
});

If you do not specify allowedTags or allowedAttributes, our default list is applied. So if you really want an empty list, specify one.

"What if I want to allow all tags or all attributes?"

Simple! Instead of leaving allowedTags or allowedAttributes out of the options, set either one or both to false:

allowedTags: false,
allowedAttributes: false

"What if I don't want to allow any tags?"

Also simple! Set allowedTags to [] and allowedAttributes to {}.

allowedTags: [],
allowedAttributes: {}

"What if I want disallowed tags to be escaped rather than discarded?"

If you set disallowedTagsMode to discard (the default), disallowed tags are discarded. Any text content or subtags is still included, depending on whether the individual subtags are allowed.

If you set disallowedTagsMode to escape, the disallowed tags are escaped rather than discarded. Any text or subtags is handled normally.

If you set disallowedTagsMode to recursiveEscape, the disallowed tags are escaped rather than discarded, and the same treatment is applied to all subtags, whether otherwise allowed or not.

"What if I want to allow only specific values on some attributes?"

When configuring the attribute in allowedAttributes simply use an object with attribute name and an allowed values array. In the following example sandbox="allow-forms allow-modals allow-orientation-lock allow-pointer-lock allow-popups allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox allow-scripts" would become sandbox="allow-popups allow-scripts":

allowedAttributes: {
  iframe: [
    {
      name: 'sandbox',
      multiple: true,
      values: ['allow-popups', 'allow-same-origin', 'allow-scripts']
    }
  ]
}

With multiple: true, several allowed values may appear in the same attribute, separated by spaces. Otherwise the attribute must exactly match one and only one of the allowed values.

Wildcards for attributes

You can use the * wildcard to allow all attributes with a certain prefix:

allowedAttributes: {
  a: [ 'href', 'data-*' ]
}

Also you can use the * as name for a tag, to allow listed attributes to be valid for any tag:

allowedAttributes: {
  '*': [ 'href', 'align', 'alt', 'center', 'bgcolor' ]
}

Additional options

Allowed CSS Classes

If you wish to allow specific CSS classes on a particular element, you can do so with the allowedClasses option. Any other CSS classes are discarded.

This implies that the class attribute is allowed on that element.

// Allow only a restricted set of CSS classes and only on the p tag
const clean = sanitizeHtml(dirty, {
  allowedTags: [ 'p', 'em', 'strong' ],
  allowedClasses: {
    'p': [ 'fancy', 'simple' ]
  }
});

Similar to allowedAttributes, you can use * to allow classes with a certain prefix, or use * as a tag name to allow listed classes to be valid for any tag:

allowedClasses: {
  'code': [ 'language-*', 'lang-*' ],
  '*': [ 'fancy', 'simple' ]
}

Furthermore, regular expressions are supported too:

allowedClasses: {
  p: [ /^regex\d{2}$/ ]
}

Note: It is advised that your regular expressions always begin with ^ so that you are requiring a known prefix. A regular expression with neither ^ nor $ just requires that something appear in the middle.

Allowed CSS Styles

If you wish to allow specific CSS styles on a particular element, you can do that with the allowedStyles option. Simply declare your desired attributes as regular expression options within an array for the given attribute. Specific elements will inherit allowlisted attributes from the global (*) attribute. Any other CSS classes are discarded.

You must also use allowedAttributes to activate the style attribute for the relevant elements. Otherwise this feature will never come into play.

When constructing regular expressions, don't forget ^ and $. It's not enough to say "the string should contain this." It must also say "and only this."

URLs in inline styles are NOT filtered by any mechanism other than your regular expression.

const clean = sanitizeHtml(dirty, {
        allowedTags: ['p'],
        allowedAttributes: {
          'p': ["style"],
        },
        allowedStyles: {
          '*': {
            // Match HEX and RGB
            'color': [/^#(0x)?[0-9a-f]+$/i, /^rgb\(\s*(\d{1,3})\s*,\s*(\d{1,3})\s*,\s*(\d{1,3})\s*\)$/],
            'text-align': [/^left$/, /^right$/, /^center$/],
            // Match any number with px, em, or %
            'font-size': [/^\d+(?:px|em|%)$/]
          },
          'p': {
            'font-size': [/^\d+rem$/]
          }
        }
      });

Discarding text outside of <html></html> tags

Some text editing applications generate HTML to allow copying over to a web application. These can sometimes include undesireable control characters after terminating html tag. By default sanitize-html will not discard these characters, instead returning them in sanitized string. This behaviour can be modified using enforceHtmlBoundary option.

Setting this option to true will instruct sanitize-html to discard all characters outside of html tag boundaries -- before <html> and after </html> tags.

enforceHtmlBoundary: true

htmlparser2 Options

sanitize-html is built on htmlparser2. By default the only option passed down is decodeEntities: true. You can set the options to pass by using the parser option.

Security note: changing the parser settings can be risky. In particular, decodeEntities: false has known security concerns and a complete test suite does not exist for every possible combination of settings when used with sanitize-html. If security is your goal we recommend you use the defaults rather than changing parser, except for the lowerCaseTags option.

const clean = sanitizeHtml(dirty, {
  allowedTags: ['a'],
  parser: {
    lowerCaseTags: true
  }
});

See the htmlparser2 wiki for the full list of possible options.

Transformations

What if you want to add or change an attribute? What if you want to transform one tag to another? No problem, it's simple!

The easiest way (will change all ol tags to ul tags):

const clean = sanitizeHtml(dirty, {
  transformTags: {
    'ol': 'ul',
  }
});

The most advanced usage:

const clean = sanitizeHtml(dirty, {
  transformTags: {
    'ol': function(tagName, attribs) {
      // My own custom magic goes here
      return {
        tagName: 'ul',
        attribs: {
          class: 'foo'
        }
      };
    }
  }
});

You can specify the * wildcard instead of a tag name to transform all tags.

There is also a helper method which should be enough for simple cases in which you want to change the tag and/or add some attributes:

const clean = sanitizeHtml(dirty, {
  transformTags: {
    'ol': sanitizeHtml.simpleTransform('ul', {class: 'foo'}),
  }
});

The simpleTransform helper method has 3 parameters:

simpleTransform(newTag, newAttributes, shouldMerge)

The last parameter (shouldMerge) is set to true by default. When true, simpleTransform will merge the current attributes with the new ones (newAttributes). When false, all existing attributes are discarded.

You can also add or modify the text contents of a tag:

const clean = sanitizeHtml(dirty, {
  transformTags: {
    'a': function(tagName, attribs) {
      return {
        tagName: 'a',
        text: 'Some text'
      };
    }
  }
});

For example, you could transform a link element with missing anchor text:

<a href="http://somelink.com"></a>

To a link with anchor text:

<a href="http://somelink.com">Some text</a>

Filters

You can provide a filter function to remove unwanted tags. Let's suppose we need to remove empty a tags like:

<a href="page.html"></a>

We can do that with the following filter:

sanitizeHtml(
  '<p>This is <a href="http://www.linux.org"></a><br/>Linux</p>',
  {
    exclusiveFilter: function(frame) {
      return frame.tag === 'a' && !frame.text.trim();
    }
  }
);

The frame object supplied to the callback provides the following attributes:

• tag: The tag name, i.e. 'img'.
• attribs: The tag's attributes, i.e. { src: "/path/to/tux.png" }.
• text: The text content of the tag.
• mediaChildren: Immediate child tags that are likely to represent self-contained media (e.g., img, video, picture, iframe). See the mediaTags variable in src/index.js for the full list.
• tagPosition: The index of the tag's position in the result string.

You can also process all text content with a provided filter function. Let's say we want an ellipsis instead of three dots.

<p>some text...</p>

We can do that with the following filter:

sanitizeHtml(
  '<p>some text...</p>',
  {
    textFilter: function(text, tagName) {
      if (['a'].indexOf(tagName) > -1) return //Skip anchor tags

      return text.replace(/\.\.\./, '&hellip;');
    }
  }
);

Note that the text passed to the textFilter method is already escaped for safe display as HTML. You may add markup and use entity escape sequences in your textFilter.

Iframe Filters

If you would like to allow iframe tags but want to control the domains that are allowed through, you can provide an array of hostnames and/or array of domains that you would like to allow as iframe sources. This hostname is a property in the options object passed as an argument to the sanitize-html function.

These arrays will be checked against the html that is passed to the function and return only src urls that include the allowed hostnames or domains in the object. The url in the html that is passed must be formatted correctly (valid hostname) as an embedded iframe otherwise the module will strip out the src from the iframe.

Make sure to pass a valid hostname along with the domain you wish to allow, i.e.:

allowedIframeHostnames: ['www.youtube.com', 'player.vimeo.com'],
allowedIframeDomains: ['zoom.us']

You may also specify whether or not to allow relative URLs as iframe sources.

allowIframeRelativeUrls: true

Note that if unspecified, relative URLs will be allowed by default if no hostname or domain filter is provided but removed by default if a hostname or domain filter is provided.

Remember that the iframe tag must be allowed as well as the src attribute.

For example:

const clean = sanitizeHtml('<p><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nykIhs12345"></iframe><p>', {
  allowedTags: [ 'p', 'em', 'strong', 'iframe' ],
  allowedClasses: {
    'p': [ 'fancy', 'simple' ],
  },
  allowedAttributes: {
    'iframe': ['src']
  },
  allowedIframeHostnames: ['www.youtube.com', 'player.vimeo.com']
});

will pass through as safe whereas:

const clean = sanitizeHtml('<p><iframe src="https://www.youtube.net/embed/nykIhs12345"></iframe><p>', {
  allowedTags: [ 'p', 'em', 'strong', 'iframe' ],
  allowedClasses: {
    'p': [ 'fancy', 'simple' ],
  },
  allowedAttributes: {
    'iframe': ['src']
  },
  allowedIframeHostnames: ['www.youtube.com', 'player.vimeo.com']
});

or

const clean = sanitizeHtml('<p><iframe src="https://www.vimeo/video/12345"></iframe><p>', {
  allowedTags: [ 'p', 'em', 'strong', 'iframe' ],
  allowedClasses: {
    'p': [ 'fancy', 'simple' ],
  },
  allowedAttributes: {
    'iframe': ['src']
  },
  allowedIframeHostnames: ['www.youtube.com', 'player.vimeo.com']
});

will return an empty iframe tag.

If you want to allow any subdomain of any level you can provide the domain in allowedIframeDomains

// This iframe markup will pass through as safe.
const clean = sanitizeHtml('<p><iframe src="https://us02web.zoom.us/embed/12345"></iframe><p>', {
  allowedTags: [ 'p', 'em', 'strong', 'iframe' ],
  allowedClasses: {
    'p': [ 'fancy', 'simple' ],
  },
  allowedAttributes: {
    'iframe': ['src']
  },
  allowedIframeHostnames: ['www.youtube.com', 'player.vimeo.com'],
  allowedIframeDomains: ['zoom.us']
});

Script Filters

Similarly to iframes you can allow a script tag on a list of allowlisted domains

const clean = sanitizeHtml('<script src="https://www.safe.authorized.com/lib.js"></script>', {
    allowedTags: ['script'],
    allowedAttributes: {
        script: ['src']
    },
    allowedScriptDomains: ['authorized.com'],
})

You can allow a script tag on a list of allowlisted hostnames too

const clean = sanitizeHtml('<script src="https://www.authorized.com/lib.js"></script>', {
    allowedTags: ['script'],
    allowedAttributes: {
        script: ['src']
    },
    allowedScriptHostnames: [ 'www.authorized.com' ],
})

Allowed URL schemes

By default, we allow the following URL schemes in cases where href, src, etc. are allowed:

[ 'http', 'https', 'ftp', 'mailto' ]

You can override this if you want to:

sanitizeHtml(
  // teeny-tiny valid transparent GIF in a data URL
  '<img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" />',
  {
    allowedTags: [ 'img', 'p' ],
    allowedSchemes: [ 'data', 'http' ]
  }
);

You can also allow a scheme for a particular tag only:

allowedSchemes: [ 'http', 'https' ],
allowedSchemesByTag: {
  img: [ 'data' ]
}

And you can forbid the use of protocol-relative URLs (starting with //) to access another site using the current protocol, which is allowed by default:

allowProtocolRelative: false

Discarding the entire contents of a disallowed tag

Normally, with a few exceptions, if a tag is not allowed, all of the text within it is preserved, and so are any allowed tags within it.

The exceptions are:

style, script, textarea, option

If you wish to replace this list, for instance to discard whatever is found inside a noscript tag, use the nonTextTags option:

nonTextTags: [ 'style', 'script', 'textarea', 'option', 'noscript' ]

Note that if you use this option you are responsible for stating the entire list. This gives you the power to retain the content of textarea, if you want to.

The content still gets escaped properly, with the exception of the script and style tags. Allowing either script or style leaves you open to XSS attacks. Don't do that unless you have good reason to trust their origin. sanitize-html will log a warning if these tags are allowed, which can be disabled with the allowVulnerableTags: true option.

Choose what to do with disallowed tags

Instead of discarding, or keeping text only, you may enable escaping of the entire content:

disallowedTagsMode: 'escape'

This will transform <disallowed>content</disallowed> to <disallowed>content</disallowed>

Valid values are: 'discard' (default), 'escape' (escape the tag) and 'recursiveEscape' (to escape the tag and all its content).

Restricting deep nesting

You can limit the depth of HTML tags in the document with the nestingLimit option:

nestingLimit: 6

This will prevent the user from nesting tags more than 6 levels deep. Tags deeper than that are stripped out exactly as if they were disallowed. Note that this means text is preserved in the usual ways where appropriate.

About ApostropheCMS

sanitize-html was created at P'unk Avenue for use in ApostropheCMS, an open-source content management system built on Node.js. If you like sanitize-html you should definitely check out ApostropheCMS.

Support

Feel free to open issues on github.

Author: Apostrophecms
Source Code: https://github.com/apostrophecms/sanitize-html 
License: MIT License

#javascript #html 

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

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

A Simple Guide to Planning API Roadmaps

APIs - the current “big thing” - offer the opportunity for modern organizations to unlock new and lucrative business models. The article below covers some tips on how to spin the API flywheel and leverage its possibilities.

In the API economy, a successful service can gain popularity and be utilized in ways unpredicted and often inconceivable by its original owners. The very flexible nature of the technology opens many doors, including business collaborations, reuse in third-party products or even conquering hardware barriers by reaching a spectrum of devices.

What to consider

Taking the builder’s perspective

Important note: Most of the time API consumers are not the end-users but rather the app developers. Any new venture ought to be supported with excellent learning resources and descriptive documentation. These things combined will ensure a top-notch developer experience and encourage adoption of your product, increasing its visibility in the market.

More than the revenue

While in the simplest scenario, the most popular API business model is revenue via service charges, there are several other goals:

• **Growth **- APIs are finely-grained and, usually, short-term projects that bring lots of value. Decoupling sectors of your business and encapsulating them in the form of concise, dedicated APIs enable teams to work in parallel, encouraging company growth.
• **Reach **- By building APIs for wide use, the organization can extend its group of recipients and open new opportunities to cooperate with other players in the market and discover new collaborations.
• **Compliance **- Products and services implemented as an API ecosystem can freely exchange data between one another, whether they are internal or external.
• **Insight **- The rate of use of APIs will surely give an idea of what consumers value the most. Also, implementing APIs alone helps to clarify what pieces of your business are crucial. This helps to revise implementation details and encourages reflection of your current technological solutions.

#api #api-development #api-integration #restful-api #api-based-business-model #api-first-development #automation #rest-api

What Are Good Traits That Make Great API Product Managers

As more companies realize the benefits of an API-first mindset and treating their APIs as products, there is a growing need for good API product management practices to make a company’s API strategy a reality. However, API product management is a relatively new field with little established knowledge on what is API product management and what a PM should be doing to ensure their API platform is successful.

Many of the current practices of API product management have carried over from other products and platforms like web and mobile, but API products have their own unique set of challenges due to the way they are marketed and used by customers. While it would be rare for a consumer mobile app to have detailed developer docs and a developer relations team, you’ll find these items common among API product-focused companies. A second unique challenge is that APIs are very developer-centric and many times API PMs are engineers themselves. Yet, this can cause an API or developer program to lose empathy for what their customers actually want if good processes are not in place. Just because you’re an engineer, don’t assume your customers will want the same features and use cases that you want.

This guide lays out what is API product management and some of the things you should be doing to be a good product manager.

#api #analytics #apis #product management #api best practices #api platform #api adoption #product managers #api product #api metrics