API Scanning: How to Scan API Endpoints?

API scanning is crawling all API definitions to identify potential endpoints. It detects vulnerabilities, gaps, security weaknesses, and misconfigurations that attackers can exploit to orchestrate API attacks. 

The Benefits 

• Discover all API endpoints, including proprietary and third-party APIs, using API-specific rules 
• Proactively detect shadow, rogue, zombie, and other undocumented APIs. It ensures they don’t blindside you
• Proactively identify all known API vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and flaws, including OWASP Top 10 API risks 
• Identify and analyze unknown, logical, and zero-day API vulnerabilities using automated and manual pen testing
• Use comprehensive API scanning reports to fix/ remediate/ manage vulnerabilities effectively 
• Understand the protection status of vulnerabilities via centralized dashboards 
• Prevent a wide range of known and unknown API threats. Fix flaws and vulnerabilities proactively through intelligent scanning 
• Understand your risks and harden your security posture 

API Scanning Requires API-Specific Tools and Methods 

API endpoints and web apps endpoints are different. Web applications rely mostly on web server endpoints to do the heavy lifting in processing and handling user requests. However, APIs offer data access at a more atomic level. It manages API requests directly, and backend data stories structure the replies. 

This means the resulting vulnerabilities are different. Also, the steps on how to scan API endpoints are different too. 

You cannot rely on generic scanning tools to identify API vulnerabilities and gaps. Your organization needs API-specific scanning tools. Only API-specific security tools can manage modern-day architectures’ complexity and growing sophistication. 

Planning and Goal Setting 

The first step in scanning APIs is defining goals and planning the scanning processes. At this stage, you must define the following:

• Key metrics to track and monitor
• Tools to use
• Responsibilities and ownership in scanning & security
• How scanning fits into the API security process 

Visualize APIs using API Definitions 

API definitions are also known as API specifications or description formats. They are language-agnostic baseline guides for machine consumption. By leveraging API definitions, automated tools perform different activities like generating API documentation, monitoring APIs, and testing. 

API definitions are key for API scanning and testing. API definitions tell automated tools the following details:

• How is the API organized and structured?
• How it functions and behaves?
• How it links with other APIs?
• Expected results in a machine-learning format

In other words, the definitions help tools better visualize the API. API security scanning tools leverage the API definitions and predefined rules to detect vulnerabilities. 

Managed scanning solutions use API definitions to ensure scanners can detect all vulnerabilities. Such solutions are equipped to visualize even complex API structures. 

They can unearth shadow, rogue, and zombie APIs. This helps prevent being blindsided by them while keeping the API inventory updated. 

Deep, Intelligent, Human-Augmented Automated Scanning 

Your API scanning tools must perform deep, intelligent, and automated scanning to detect all known and emerging vulnerabilities. It should be backed with the latest threat intelligence, global threat feeds, and past security reports.

You must fine-tune the rules, policies, parameters, and API definitions. It ensures the scanner effectively identifies the latest vulnerabilities. 

In addition, the API scanning solution must include automated and manual pen-testing to understand logical and unknown flaws.  

Another critical aspect of scanning APIs is false positive management. When false positives are minimal, it helps accelerate the pace and efficacy of remediating vulnerabilities. This is because your developers will not waste their time and efforts on fixing issues that don’t exist. 

Reporting 

API scanning, like web scanning, is incomplete without proper reporting and documentation of the findings. The insights the scan reports provide are central to effectively managing security risks. 

It helps to augment pen testing. Improves overall security! 

Conclusion 

API scanning is the first step in API security, not the silver bullet solution to resolving API risks. It needs to be part of a comprehensive API security solution.