API security testing is a vital part of any modern application security program but requires automation to keep up with the pace of development. Having a comprehensive DAST solution that can act as an API scanner to find and scan API endpoints alongside other parts of your web application environment can make a big difference to AppSec efficiency and risk reduction.
Microservice architectures, public web services, system integrations, unified backends for web and mobile apps—all these things and more are made possible by APIs, or application programming interfaces. APIs are the backbone of modern web technologies but come with their own challenges and security risks, requiring as much (if not more) security testing as the user-facing parts of applications. Manual penetration testing can rarely keep up with the scope and speed of development, making API security scanners vital tools to maintain a baseline level of application security testing across API and GUI attack surfaces in between pentests.
API security scanning involves automatically analyzing APIs to uncover vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance issues. This starts with discovering endpoints using various approaches and may include validating adherence to schemas defined in API specifications, but in-depth API vulnerability scanning is the most important capability to keep in mind.
While API security is often treated as a separate field of cybersecurity, it is an integral part of application security, so any vulnerability scanner you use for your web apps should ideally also cover your APIs. That way, scanning APIs doesn’t require separate tooling to uncover security issues in the underlying systems and applications, like having a REST API scanner for your REST endpoints, a web vulnerability scanner for your websites, and so on. Advanced DAST (dynamic application security testing) tools with API-specific features now exist that are able to simulate real-world attack scenarios across the entire application attack surface, including testing API endpoints and finding API-specific vulnerabilities.
Modern APIs are integral to the functionality and often the internal architecture of web applications, making them a significant attack surface. Compared to more visible graphical user interfaces, they tend to fly under the radar when it comes to asset inventory and testing—including security testing. Key reasons to prioritize API security scanning include:
Scanning APIs presents unique challenges compared to testing traditional web applications. This starts with scanning to find API definitions and endpoints in the first place because, unlike websites and web applications, APIs can’t be crawled to find test targets and determine their input parameters. Any API security scanner worth its salt should therefore cover multiple aspects of API discovery and testing, including at least:
To build and maintain a solid API security posture, organizations should make vulnerability scanning an integral part of their wider API and application security strategy. The following best practices will help you maximize security benefits from API vulnerability scanning:
APIs are an inescapable part of the web application landscape, both as external data interchange points and as a means of internal communication between software components. All too often, applications are deployed and updated far too quickly for manual security testing to keep up with the changes, and APIs are their most dynamic parts. Reliable and accurate application vulnerability scanners (DAST tools) are a vital part of any cybersecurity program—and to be truly effective, they also need to cover APIs.
As the only AppSec vendor, Invicti can help you with automated discovery and vulnerability scanning across your web applications and APIs alike, all on a single platform that integrates deeply into existing workflows and toolchains. Read more about how Invicti combines app and API discovery and security testing on one platform, and schedule a demo to streamline your application security testing—including your API security!