What's New in WSO2 API Manager 3.2.0?

WSO2 API Manager 3.2.0 the third release of the API Manager 3.x series, simplifies integrating with other ecosystems while reducing complexity of large scale deployments.

By simplifying integration with other IAM solutions, version 3.2.0 allows itself fit into existing deployments without major changes. And with the help of reduced dependencies on KeyManager, File-less artifact deployment and support for Publisher initiated Microgateway deployments, rough edges with large scales deployments have been ironed out and usability and manageability has been improved to a great extent.

Due to the simplicity and extensibility offered, I thought of discussing those among all other features.

Seamless integration with WSO2 IAM, Okta, KeyCloak and other IAM solutions

3.2.0 makes integrating with different IAM solutions seamless. This is useful when the organisation’s Identity and Access Management is centrally handled through a single IAM solution. In such a scenario Consumers and Consumer Applications are centrally managed and the organisation prefers issuing and managing tokens centrally.

In these situations, the ability to extend Key Manager support becomes quite handy, which allows using an Organisation’s IAM solution to work with the API Manager. In a standard deployment it’s through the Key Manager profile OAuth Consumer Applications are created and tokens are obtained from. While the token passes through Gateway, Key Manager is called to validate the key. Now with the ability to extend Key Manager support, different IAM solutions like Okta, KeyCloak, Auth0, PingIdentity,etc… can be used in place of the default Key Manager.

Multiple Key Managers shown in Admin UI

This support is not entirely new since some of these changes were first introduced as early as in APIM 1.9.0. But in those versions integrating a different Key Manager was only possible through a custom implementation. Moreover, only a single Key Manager was allowed for the entire APIM distribution. The latest release addresses these limitations by allowing to

• Configure a Key Manager through a UI
• Keep multiple Key Managers within a single tenant
• Maintain a different Key Manager per each tenant
• Select Key Manager per API

One challenge present in the previous releases was Application Creation UI in Developer Portal remaining static regardless of the Key Manager used. This would hide different options provided by the connected IAM solution and would force to mold certain options into existing UI elements. The new release solves this by rendering the Application Creation UI with the attributes provided by the IAM connected.

Portal gets rendered differently for different Key-Managers

Now using the New Key Manager Configuration UI, you can simply connect with Okta (or with other supported IAMs) by populating different fields (or by using the well known configuration url).

Key-Manager can be selected at the API level

For more information you can refer this document.

#api #security #programming #developer

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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

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

WSO2 Token API Invocation From a Mediation Sequence in WSO2 APIM 3.1.0

In this article, I am going to show how we can invoke WSO2’s token API from a mediation sequence to get the access/bearer token which is used to invoke APIs’ secured using Oauth in WSO2. Here I have created an API in WSO2 APIM for achieving this functionality.

1. Create an API named “InvokeTokenAPI” in WSO2 API Publisher as below.

2. Go to Resources tab and create a GET resource with the name “gettoken” as shown below and click the plus icon. Then disable security for this resource and click Save at the bottom.

#tutorial #integration #api #wso2 #wso2 esb #wso2 api manager #api invocation

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

Django security releases issued: 3.2.4, 3.1.12, and 2.2.24 | Weblog | Django

Django security releases issued: 3.2.4, 3.1.12, and 2.2.24

Posted by Carlton Gibson  on Tháng 6 2, 2021

In accordance with our security release policy, the Django team is issuing Django 3.2.4, Django 3.1.12, and Django 2.2.24. These release addresses the security issue detailed below. We encourage all users of Django to upgrade as soon as possible.

CVE-2021-33203: Potential directory traversal via admindocs

Staff members could use the admindocs TemplateDetailView view to check the existence of arbitrary files. Additionally, if (and only if) the default admindocs templates have been customized by the developers to also expose the file contents, then not only the existence but also the file contents would have been exposed.

As a mitigation, path sanitation is now applied and only files within the template root directories can be loaded.

This issue has low severity, according to the Django security policy.

Thanks to Rasmus Lerchedahl Petersen and Rasmus Wriedt Larsen from the CodeQL Python team for the report.

CVE-2021-33571: Possible indeterminate SSRF, RFI, and LFI attacks since validators accepted leading zeros in IPv4 addresses

URLValidator, validate_ipv4_address(), and validate_ipv46_address() didn’t prohibit leading zeros in octal literals. If you used such values you could suffer from indeterminate SSRF, RFI, and LFI attacks.

validate_ipv4_address() and validate_ipv46_address() validators were not affected on Python 3.9.5+.

This issue has medium severity, according to the Django security policy.

Affected supported versions

• Django main branch
• Django 3.2
• Django 3.1
• Django 2.2

#django #weblog #django security releases issued: 3.2.4, 3.1.12, and 2.2.24 #3.2.4 #3.1.12 #2.2.24