Test And Secure Your APIs With RapidAPI
APIs play a pivotal role in a client-server model. It acts as a communication channel between the client and the server so that they can exchange and manipulate data. Securing these APIs are essential to ensure there is no downtime and the application does not suffer.
It is important that you test your API security regularly to ensure its integrity. It will also help you find loopholes that can bring down your API.
In this piece, we will learn how RapidAPI tools can help you test and secure your API. So without any further ado, let’s jump in!
Areas To Test In An API
There are multiple areas where you can test your APIs to see if it is secure. Let’s discuss these areas in detail.
1. Request Body
Users can send more data to your API by intercepting the request in the middle. This can lead to severe repercussions. This is one area where you can test your API security via an API Client to check how it performs.
Ideally, you should never store the request body as it is in your database. You may have added some checks that reject the API call if a particular value is not present inside the request body. This check doesn’t validate if the request body contains more data than expected.
2. Handling of code injections
An API developer should never rely on the end user to provide accurate data. They should always validate the data provided by the user against the defined standards. If the user has provided a description, it should also be checked against a regex. This is another area where we can test our API security.
Due to a lack of API security, malicious code often gets to the server. If the code is executed, it can affect server files.
You can use RapidAPI Client for VS Code to check what will happen if you send a code snippet as a part of an API request.
You can use RapidAPI Studio to protect your API against code and SQL injections.
3. Data handling
Under-fetching and over-fetching are most common in REST APIs. But it is also possible that you handle it on the server. Sending excessive amounts of data to the client is a bad practice and another area where we can test our API.
RapidAPI Client can help you check API responses for different API requests. You can use this extension to look at your API response and then take action accordingly if the data is excessive.
4. Payload Size
In POST/PUT requests, we take data from the user and send it to the server as a payload. The size of the payload can significantly affect your API performance. If the user uploads a huge file, it can ultimately bring the API down and the web app. This is another area where we can test our API.
If you have not taken care of this, you can use RapidAPI Studio to do it for you. It lets you define the maximum request size. The request will fail if the user sends a huge payload.
5. Prevention against Denial of Service Attack
Denial of service is one of the most common ways to bring an API down. Implementing rate limiting in your API is a good way to take care of it. Otherwise, even an authenticated user can call your API multiple times in a minute and take it down.
If you use RapidAPI Studio to manage your API, you can use rate limiting out of the box. All you need to do is set it up inside the monetize section, and you are good to go.
These are some of the many areas where you can test your REST APIs.
Wrap Up
That’s all, folks! I hope now you know about some places where you can start testing your API. If you want to learn more about RapidAPI Client for VS Code, I recommend you read this piece. It has covered almost everything about this API client.