Introduction To API Security Vulnerabilities
Everyone is using APIs to build large-scale applications. APIs are made scalable so they can grow as an application grows. You also need to ensure that your APIs are secure; otherwise, anyone can unethically access its data.
There are many different vulnerabilities that you need to take care of while developing an API. Let’s take a look at some of them.
Man-in-the-Middle
It is a type of cyber attack where someone is intercepting the communication between two parties. It can be client and server communication or client to client communication using APIs. This can be a high-security vulnerability, especially if you are exchanging sensitive data over communication.
To prevent this, you need to ensure that your communication is encrypted. You can achieve this by adding an SSL certificate to encrypt your API communication.
Committing API Key Publicly
When building an application, you often use a platform where you put your code for collaboration. This can be GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc. If your application source code is public and you are using some API to fetch some resources, you need to make sure you do not commit your API key along with the source code.
It would be best if you use environment variables for this. For this, create a .env.local file in the root of your project and put your API key there and then access the environment variable in your code to get the API key.
Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS)
If your API does not have a rate-limiting feature implemented, then it is vulnerable to DDoS attacks. A DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt regular traffic of a target server, service, or network by overwhelming the target with a flood of internet traffic. The rate-limiting, if implemented, will stop serving the user data after a particular limit has been reached.