Security is critical to a successful API. No developer wants to use an API with vulnerabilities that bad actors could exploit. If your company designs and builds APIs, you must ensure they remain secure.
You can start by implementing API governance best practices and rules to improve the quality and security of all your APIs.
Establishing an API governance strategy
Before you do anything else, you need to catalog your APIs. You can’t govern (or secure!) your APIs if you don’t know where they are, which team is working on which one, and who’s using them.
Once you’ve cataloged your APIs, you can plan for API governance. This involves implementing a framework or model for policies, best practices, tools, and processes to ensure the quality, consistency, and predictability of your APIs. Governance also ensures that APIs align with the goals of the organization.
API governance roles and responsibilities vary depending on the size of your organization. Larger companies and those that follow a guild or team-lead model typically have a centralized team to handle governance across the organization. The team establishes API governance standards and manages their enforcement. Companies prioritizing governance and security ensure that the roles and responsibilities are well defined.
How does API governance help strengthen API security?
API security involves implementing tools and practices to prevent vulnerabilities in APIs that could lead to unauthorized access and potential threats. Without proper security, an API may become vulnerable to attacks that lead to data breaches, service disruptions, IP theft, or compliance failures. These can lead to direct and indirect financial losses.
Companies that build APIs need to ensure they remain secure throughout their lifecycle. API governance does that by:
- Establishing standards for security practices, e.g., authentication, authorization, and encryption
- Enforcing access control
- Ensuring the security of data exchanged through APIs — this is also required to comply with regulations like GDPR (EU law) and HIPAA (US law)
- Promoting version control
All these measures strengthen API security, which you can implement with a combination of API governance tools.
Tools for API governance
Effective API governance involves many different tools, some of them automated. Common tools include:
- An API specification: A standard for defining and structuring APIs, like the OpenAPI Specification.
- An API style guide: Setting the guidelines for your API, a style guide can help you follow standards and best practices for all parts of the API, including security.
- A linter: An automated tool that validates an API against predefined rules or guidelines, typically found in an API specification document. You can use a linter to automate your API style guide!
- API design tools: Some include collaboration features and help you design APIs following specifications like OpenAPI.
- API testing tools: These help catch problems with APIs before and after deployment. API testing tools address different API aspects, like function, load, performance, integration, contracts, and security.
- An API gateway: A mediator between backend services (APIs) and clients. It can perform many functions, such as route API calls, control access, enable rate limiting, monitor API traffic, and enable analytics.
- An API management platform: Allows you to manage nearly every aspect of an API throughout its lifecycle, including authentication and authorization, rate limiting, logging, and API access.
- API security tools: The capabilities of security tools vary widely, with some automatically detecting vulnerabilities in APIs and potential threats like distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) and man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, as well as code injection.
If you visit the Tyk documentation, you’ll see products that facilitate API governance, such as Tyk API Designer, Tyk API Gateway, and Tyk API Management Platform.
Best practices for API governance tools
You can achieve good API governance with the tools above. But you should always do so while following these best practices:
- Create a central repository (single source of truth) so that everyone involved in the process can see API changes and discuss them.
- Establish rules that reflect API style preferences and concerns regarding security and compliance.
- Generate consistent documentation and update it regularly, especially for code changes.
- Make repeatable code blocks easier to find and use — this improves consistency.
- Implement versioning to introduce changes without breaking clients that rely on older API versions.
Another essential best practice is to automate your processes. You can set up your tools to automatically:
- Reject or flag non-compliant code
- Validate APIs (use linters)
- Generate and run API tests
- Notify stakeholders when certain functions or libraries are used, triggering a review by SMEs
This last item touches on our final best practice. While you should automate as many API governance processes as possible, don’t skip human code reviews. Automation will make those reviews faster and more thorough instead.
Follow these best practices when using the tools highlighted above. They can help you implement and better manage API governance as well as API security.
How governance tools can improve API security
You can use API governance tools to strengthen API security by:
- Following consistent authentication standards for all endpoints
- Keeping endpoints, methods, and data organized so authentication works properly
- Following data segregation rules
- Using consistent data validation practices
- Enforcing policies around encryption at rest, encryption in transit, and data retention
- Applying the same rate limiting and load balancing measures to all endpoints and tenants
- Keeping proper guardrails between tenants
This list is only the beginning. With proper tools, you can do even more to improve the security of your APIs.
API governance and API security go hand in hand
API governance is about setting and enforcing standards for your APIs, which promotes consistency. A lack of consistency leads to insecure, poor-performing APIs. There’s a clear synergy between API governance and API security.
When you use API governance practices to enforce security standards, you’ll deliver more consistent and secure API products. And that benefits API consumers and your business!
