The second article in this series covered everything you need to know about access control. Once your security protocols and commands are in place, you’ll need to understand how to monitor your API keys’ usage to ensure bad actors are not taking advantage.
However, there are challenges associated with identifying who is using your keys, understanding API value for authorized users, and targeting the correct metrics to monitor. You can solve these concerns with the proper analytics, but with so much information to digest, you may find yourself overwhelmed with how to interpret it.
This guide will answer these complex questions and give you a holistic understanding of monitoring your API. After all, survey data indicates that 35% of organizations focus on API performance.
What Is API Monitoring?
API monitoring is a method of observing API keys in applications to garner insight into their performance, availability, and responsiveness to evaluate your API’s functionality. It is a cybersecurity best practice that helps organizations locate any outages or subpar performing API calls, leading to application, website, or adjacent services failure, which negatively impacts the user experience.
API monitoring identifies issues directly from your API testing and monitoring solution by analyzing and providing visibility into API issues. API key monitors quickly facilitate the identification, prevention, and solution of issues through alerts and anomaly detection before they snowball into larger ones.
An anomaly is a contradiction that deviates from normal behavior. For example, if you’re using a banking application and withdraw consistent amounts of $100 per month from your savings, and one month a withdrawal of $10,000 occurs, that would be considered an anomaly.
API monitoring tools utilize a subset of artificial intelligence called machine learning (ML) to detect such anomalies. ML will utilize time-series analysis, defined as observations recorded in a linear progression that correlate in time. This is how API monitoring determines if a mechanism different than normal triggered a request, which may signal bot or bad actor activity.
Afterwards, the software will alert authorized users. Alerting is a reactive solution by a monitoring system that triggers when an API check fails.
Why You Should Monitor Your API Key Usage
API monitoring allows you to determine API availability, behaviour, and functional correctness. API keys are the white blood cells of your application or website. They determine who is allowed to have access to an API. Therefore, their failure can onset a complete system failure if not properly managed.
If you don’t have a clear understanding of what is going on behind the scenes, you’ll inadvertently create blind spots in your organization and endanger key components of running your business. If your business utilizes APIs in any capacity or provides them as a service, it is essential to ensure they are available, responsive, and secure.
The API Monitoring Process
API monitoring software triggers the API based on predetermined parameters or from multiple locations and records performance timings and response details. The API monitoring process consists of the following steps:
- Configure – This step is all about defining the parameters for the API, such as HTTP method, URL, request details, location, and expected values. This sets the framework for the monitored API.
- Run – Next, the software periodically triggers the API from the specified location with the preconfigured parameters. Afterwards, the system records those results.
- Alert – The app cross-checks the results against the expected values from the configuration step. The system will send alerts to the user if the results do not match the expected value.
- Report –The final step is for the system to produce reports on response times and availability over a certain period for long-term analysis.
Metrics to Consider for API Key Usage
You should pay attention to certain metrics to determine if your API delivers value to its users and avoid focusing on vanity metrics.
Requests Per Minute (RPM)
As an API metric, RPM is straightforward. It refers to measuring the number of requests your API handles per minute. This number will change depending on the date and time, so its primary use is to establish a baseline of request numbers.
Rate of Failure
It’s critical to understand how many times failure will occur. API technology is not fool-proof, and like any other software, it can and will fail. If you know that your API can fail, deciding on a course of action is easier. You’ll be able to determine if an alternative scenario is best or if utilizing a different API service is the proper choice.
Latency
Network latency, measured in milliseconds, is the time needed for a request or data to go from its source to the destination. The goal is for your latency to be as close to zero as possible. The higher your latency, the more negative experience users will have.
API Uptime
API uptime is calculated based on the window of time a server is available during a select period. This metric lets you check if a request can be successfully sent to the API endpoint and garner a response with the expected HTTP status code.
CPU Usage and Memory
Measure the impact your APIs have on your servers. Two important metrics for determining this impact are CPU and memory usage. A high CPU usage can mean the server is subject to overloading, creating bottlenecks that negatively affect the user experience.
Memory usage allows you to identify the quantity of your resource use. Understanding these metrics can help you determine whether you need to downgrade your machine or upgrade to ease the stress put on it so you can avoid bottlenecks.
Time to First Hello World (TTFHW)
Developers will be familiar with the concept of TTFHW as the first expression in a new programming language that will output the text “hello world.” TTFHW refers to the time the user requires to make their initial API transaction since landing on your web page.
Ensuring Your API Is Valuable
In the past, APIs were middleware responsible for integrating and exchanging data across multiple systems. API efforts were a product of the IT division, rendering the taxonomy (hierarchical framework) used to categorize them as non-intuitive and technical. This prohibited business stakeholders from engaging in API prioritization and design.
In today’s landscape, industry-leading businesses are defining their API taxonomy in a common language that business and IT units understand. The key is to discern between APIs that directly serve the business against those that enable technical functionality. Streamlined taxonomy can significantly reduce API analysis time and increase adoption and value realization.
Proper taxonomy allows business and IT personnel to have conversations about which APIs directly steer the customer experiences (business) and the ones that are part of the infrastructure that permit the delivery of those experiences (technical). In other words, a more efficient categorization of APIs has led to a wider possibility of understanding if an API provides value to the customer experience or not.
Now that we’ve covered API monitoring, let’s dive into some of the challenges associated with determining who is using your keys and best practices for preventing bad actors from accessing your API based on the metrics above.
Challenges of API Security
APIs may utilize similar frameworks and models, but that doesn’t change that data protocols always differ. That’s why effective API security translates the various data formats and languages that different protocols use and the intention of each request. However, this is easier said than done for the reasons below.
APIs Are Unique
API protection is about understanding the design principles behind the API. This requires sorting and understanding permutations and code layers formed by human variation and technological intricacy.
The common foundational framework of APIs includes XML and gRPC. However, there’s no way to understand how a developer designed any given app. Due to this, the types of markups, data, and the application logic itself will vary.
Layers of code in an API are often robust. Parsers require a lot of data to decode app design. The challenge lies in the fact that you may find JSON inside one layer but a different iteration of code in another layer.
Service API Management
Many software as a service (SaaS) platforms are only available via API. These service APIs have added security obstacles based on their variation of security and authentication models and high data volume. Two ends of the connection belong to two different businesses with service APIs. Therefore, different security and authentication models are necessary to protect each entity.
Poor Communication
To create rules for API protection, security teams must identify what a specific API endpoint should do and how. This information should come from the development team but often disappears in cross-functional communication.
To secure API keys, you must understand how the API should function, which requires careful documentation. However, developers don’t always properly prepare documentation for APIs. If documentation isn’t reliable, aligning security and business objectives for the API is difficult. If these objectives aren’t aligned, security can block or allow the wrong things.
Protecting Internal APIs
As a result of technological evolution, APIs are going internal. This means your security needs to protect both internal API and front-facing APIs. By adding users, keys, or additional access to a front-facing API, you risk making internal APIs vulnerable. The management of internal APIs, their security, and how they behave with other APIs must be given the same consideration as the external ones.
API Evolution
Developers must change the way they think when it comes to API security due to an evolving landscape. For example, say a developer wants to guard a login API against credential-based static attacks while blocking all bots. However, if all the API clients are automated tools, that technically makes them operate as bots. Additionally, mobile API usage faces a lot of traffic from technical bots, adding to the obstacle of discerning “good” versus “bad” bots. Customer automation is essentially legal bots, but all bots look and behave the same from a traditional security perspective. Bot protection for APIs is not as simple as it seems.
The challenges in API key security arise from the fact that APIs are no longer simple, front-facing APIs. APIs are nuanced and combined with human variation, making them more layered every day. Developers and IT departments within organizations should consider these obstacles since they make identifying who uses API keys more challenging.
How Bad Actors Can Compromise Your API Keys
Being aware of the challenges of monitoring your API key security is one thing, but understanding how bad actors compromise your keys is another. Let’s cover some of the most common attacks. According to data, 91% of businesses have experienced some form of cyberattack.
DDoS Attacks
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is when hackers attempt to overwhelm API memory by flooding the bandwidth of the target system or by sending a large amount of information in each request. You can identify this type of attack by knowing your API’s normal memory usage or receiving alerts signifying an anomaly (a larger than the normal number of requests) according to your API monitoring tools.
MITM Attacks
A man in the middle (MITM) attack discreetly alters, relays, and intercepts requests and messages between two parties to steal sensitive information. Bad actors become the middleman by intercepting a session token issuing API to an HTTP header and a user. Once the hacker has that token, they can access the user account and steal sensitive information. API monitoring tools can detect bad actors and alert authorized users.
Injection Attacks
Injection attacks typically occur on an application running on sub-optimally developed code. To gain access, the hacker injects malicious code into software (e.g., SQL injection and cross-site scripting). Two-factor authenticators (two passcodes to gain access) and encryption can deter bad actors from injecting malicious code.
The Power of Notifications
Notifications in the form of alerts are not good if you aren’t receiving them. Your company should use an API monitoring platform that can ping you in a third-party channel such as email or Slack when new keys are created or provide updates of who has been using your API keys.
Our hacker detection feature will alert you when anomalies arise, allowing you to take the proper action to regulate your API key usage.
Take control of your API performance by signing up for a free trial today!
