DOCSLIB.ORG

Getting Security Testing Ready for the API-First

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Getting Security Testing Ready for the API-First Same Same, But Different: Getting security testing ready for the API-first era How to prevent data breaches by proactively identifying API business logic vulnerabilities. July 2021 Table of Contents PAGE 3 Key Takeaways PAGES 4 – 7 The Importance of API Security Testing PAGES 8 – 13 Common Approaches to Application Security Testing Approach #1: Static Security Testing Approach #2: Dynamic Security Testing Approach #3: Penetration Testing PAGES 14 – 15 It’s Time for a Business Logic API Security Testing Approach PAGE 16 About Imvision The dawn of a new approach: Business Logic API Security Testing 2 Key Takeaways • APIs are growing in popularity but many organizations don’t even know the extent of their APIs and vulnerabilities. • API vulnerabilities often take longer to remediate than traditional application vulnerabilities, so identifying them early is important. • Hackers can easily probe available APIs for known and unknown weaknesses. • API security testing can be very valuable, but often falls through the cracks. • Common testing approaches, black-box and white-box testing, don’t really suit APIs well. Pentesting can be a good fit, but it’s very costly and lengthy. • Since there’s no user interface, having knowledge of the app’s internal workings can help you efficiently create functional tests for the business logic. • It’s essential to place APIs front and center in your security controls, towards adopting a Full Lifecycle API Security model. • Ideally, combining aspects of all these types of API security testing would create a grey-box solution that compensates for the weaknesses of each of these individual approaches. • Such a business logic approach would intelligently examine results of other test types and can adapt to apply improved tests, either automatically or manually. The dawn of a new approach: Business Logic API Security Testing 3 The Importance of API Security Testing While APIs have been around since the early 2000s, today, they are everywhere. APIs are now expected and demanded throughout the industry, and their use is still growing. And no wonder: APIs work like magic to interconnect disparate apps and devices, driving business synergies and efficiencies like never before. Figure 1: Growth in API use driven by cloud, IoT, and other open standards (Source: Informatica.com) In a 2021 survey, 73% of enterprises reported that they have more than 50 APIs, and this number is constantly growing. The dawn of a new approach: Business Logic API Security Testing 4 From a business strategy perspective, APIs give you unprecedented power to share back-end data and functionality with customers, business partners, and other stakeholders. And their usefulness continues to expand, thanks to the estimated 80 billion IoT devices that will be in use by 2025. Figure 2. Business goals driving API adoption (Source: “Gartner’s API Strategy Maturity Model”, 21 October 2019) When looking at these figures on the growing importance of APIs, the most important takeaway is for businesses today: APIs are no longer solely a developer component hidden deep in the stack. They have become a key business enabler, if not the core of a business itself when it comes to API monetization. But like any software component, APIs are bound to have security flaws. And if they’re not tested rigorously from a security standpoint, they also offer a huge array of new attack surfaces and expose you to unprecedented risk. It’s important to remember that APIs are more than just connectors; they shift your application’s functionality, often in unpredictable ways. For instance, they move much of the processing logic from the backend to the frontend, which comes with a lot more vulnerabilities and factors beyond your control, such as HTTP requests becoming far more complicated since they involve more parameters when you’re dealing with APIs. The dawn of a new approach: Business Logic API Security Testing 5 While API vulnerabilities become exploitable when deployed in production, they can still be discovered in a staging environment. The staging environment is essential because it lets your team perform a few essential pre-production steps: • Conduct QA and performance testing • Perform vulnerability testing and risk assessment • Handle integration testing to ensure all components (services, databases, and other dependencies) function as designed Waiting until production to discover API vulnerabilities can result in expensive delays on the road to production. In the past year, have you slowed down deployment to production (or considered to) due to API security concerns? Figure 3: 60% of organizations have had to slow deployment to deal with API security testing concerns This is the reason many companies are working to shift-left security and implement a DevSecOps approach. Shifting left has a number of proven benefits, as it can: • Lower costs with earlier detection • Reduce the Mean Time to Remediate • Ensure deployment to production without delays Many organizations are already convinced of the value of shifting-left security in general. By building testing into the software development lifecycle (SDLC), they ensure it is performed continuously throughout development to prevent bottlenecks near the end. Yet API security testing is often left out of the DevSecOps big picture. This is unfortunate, given that API vulnerabilities often take longer to remediate than traditional application vulnerabilities. In a recent Imvision survey, 63% of respondents reported that it takes longer to remediate API vulnerabilities; even responses of “about the same time” are not the best thing since there are more APIs, thus more vulnerabilities. The dawn of a new approach: Business Logic API Security Testing 6 And that number is likely to increase drastically with modern applications’ rapid adoption of and dependence on APIs. Compared to traditional application vulnerabilities, with API vulnerabilities your average time to remediation is: Figure 4: API vulnerabilities take much longer to remediate than traditional application vulnerabilities The industry is beginning to wake up to the importance of API security, as many organizations are also aware of the increase in API-based attacks and fear they are at risk: Do you feel your organization is at risk of suffering an API attack in the next 12–18 months? Figure 5: Over 70% of organizations believe they are at risk for an API attack in the near future Yet, the statistics reveal that many organizations struggle with understanding where to begin. While more than half of enterprise security leaders rate API security testing as one of their top-3 priorities to protect their APIs, just under half say they don’t yet have an API security testing solution fully integrated into their development pipeline. This ebook will walk you through what you need to know about API security testing. We’ll explore the pros and cons of the most common approaches before looking at a new method that combines the best of both worlds to save you time and money while maturing toward a Full Lifecycle API Security approach. The dawn of a new approach: Business Logic API Security Testing 7 Common Approaches to Application Security Testing How can you tell if a security test is effective? In general, test effectiveness is measured using various code coverage metrics to determine the percentage of the code, the number of statements, or the number of functions that have been tested. But these metrics don’t always include APIs or account for the complexities that they introduce into the testing setup. Because of some of the unique weaknesses APIs may introduce, they demand a greater level of coverage than traditional apps, as even an obscure and unintended pathway may be exploited; this is opposed to a traditional UI-based approach, which only allows for certain prescreened input. What this means, in short, is that many of the strengths of APIs - the reason the industry has rushed to adopt them - are also their greatest weaknesses from a security perspective, as shown in the following table. Strength = API Security Weakness APIs are designed to be flexible, The type of bugs that lead to attack vectors are at the business logic reusable and expandable. or business process level and are therefore challenging to identify during staging. APIs are designed to connect and Every API is unique and proprietary. As such, its software bugs and integrate multiple vendors and sources. vulnerabilities are unique and “unknown.” APIs let third parties customize their The types of requests the API will handle are unknown at the time of requests according to their needs staging and it’s hard for the test team to anticipate all possibilities. Table 1: Comparison table demonstrating how API strengths translate into inherent security weaknesses The dawn of a new approach: Business Logic API Security Testing 8 Hackers are fully aware of the potential for APIs to open up vulnerabilities in your app. Beyond traditional web application vulnerabilities, there are many more ways in which an API may be vulnerable. That’s why they have developed many different techniques to try to crack your app through its API. For instance, APIs are often attacked by legitimate, authenticated users that exploit the API using seemingly legitimate calls but with the intent to manipulate. The range of potential vulnerabilities within APIs creates a great need for rigorous and thorough testing approaches. Yet traditionally, one problem with API security testing has been that it’s usually handled separately from regular security testing. While unit and integration testing is taken care of during development, API testing is often handled as a separate task by QA. This sometimes means that API security testing can either fall through the cracks or be undertaken without sufficient awareness of the real risks involved. To ensure a comprehensive approach, we should first consider the most common approaches to application security testing.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Model-Based Api Testing for Smt Solvers
    MODEL-BASED API TESTING FOR SMT SOLVERS Aina Niemetz ?y, Mathias Preiner ?y, Armin Biere ? ?Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria yStanford University, USA SMT Workshop 2017, July 22 – 23 Heidelberg, Germany SMT Solvers highly complex usually serve as back-end to some application key requirements: correctness robustness performance −! full verification difficult and still an open question −! solver development relies on traditional testing techniques 1/22 Testing of SMT Solvers State-of-the-art: unit tests regression test suite grammar-based black-box input fuzzing with FuzzSMT [SMT’09] generational input fuzzer for SMT-LIB v1 patched for SMT-LIB v2 compliance generates random but valid SMT-LIB input especially effective in combination with delta debugging not possible to test solver features not supported by the input language This work: model-based API fuzz testing −! generate random valid API call sequences 2/22 Model-Based API fuzz testing −! generate random valid API call sequences Previously: model-based API testing framework for SAT [TAP’13] implemented for the SAT solver Lingeling allows to test random solver configurations (option fuzzing) allows to replay erroneous solver behavior −! results promising for other solver back-ends Here: model-based API testing framework for SMT lifts SAT approach to SMT implemented for the SMT solver Boolector tailored to Boolector for QF_(AUF)BV with non-recursive first-order lambda terms −! effective and promising for other SMT solvers −! more general approach left to future
    [Show full text]
  • Devsecops DEVELOPMENT & DEVOPS INFRASTRUCTURE
    DevSecOps DEVELOPMENT & DEVOPS INFRASTRUCTURE CREATE SECURE APPLICATIONS PARASOFT’S APPROACH - BUILD SECURITY IN WITHOUT DISRUPTING THE Parasoft provides tools that help teams begin their security efforts as DEVELOPMENT PROCESS soon as the code is written, starting with static application security test- ing (SAST) via static code analysis, continuing through testing as part of Parasoft makes DevSecOps possible with API and the CI/CD system via dynamic application security testing (DAST) such functional testing, service virtualization, and the as functional testing, penetration testing, API testing, and supporting in- most complete support for important security stan- frastructure like service virtualization that enables security testing be- dards like CWE, OWASP, and CERT in the industry. fore the complete application is fully available. IMPLEMENT A SECURE CODING LIFECYCLE Relying on security specialists alone prevents the entire DevSecOps team from securing software and systems. Parasoft tooling enables the BENEFIT FROM THE team with security knowledge and training to reduce dependence on PARASOFT APPROACH security specialists alone. With a centralized SAST policy based on in- dustry standards, teams can leverage Parasoft’s comprehensive docs, examples, and embedded training while the code is being developed. ✓ Leverage your existing test efforts for Then, leverage existing functional/API tests to enhance the creation of security security tests – meaning less upfront cost, as well as less maintenance along the way. ✓ Combine quality and security to fully understand your software HARDEN THE CODE (“BUILD SECURITY IN”) Getting ahead of application security means moving beyond just test- ✓ Harden the code – don’t just look for ing into building secure software in the first place.
    [Show full text]
  • Model-Based API Testing for SMT Solvers∗
    Model-Based API Testing for SMT Solvers∗ Aina Niemetz, Mathias Preiner, and Armin Biere Institute for Formal Models and Verification Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria Abstract Verification back ends such as SMT solvers are typically highly complex pieces of soft- ware with performance, correctness and robustness as key requirements. Full verification of SMT solvers, however, is difficult due to their complex nature and still an open question. Grammar-based black-box input fuzzing proved to be effective to uncover bugs in SMT solvers but is entirely input-based and restricted to a certain input language. State-of-the- art SMT solvers, however, usually provide a rich API, which often introduces additional functionality not supported by the input language. Previous work showed that applying model-based API fuzzing to SAT solvers is more effective than input fuzzing. In this pa- per, we introduce a model-based API testing framework for our SMT solver Boolector. Our experimental results show that model-based API fuzzing in combination with delta debugging techniques is effective for testing SMT solvers. 1 Introduction State-of-the-art Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers are typically highly complex pieces of software, and since they usually serve as back-end to some application, the level of trust in this application strongly depends on the level of trust in the underlying solver. Full verification of SMT solvers, however, is difficult due to their complex nature and still an open question. Hence, solver developers usually rely on traditional testing techniques such as unit and regression tests. At the SMT workshop in 2009, in [10] Brummayer et al.
    [Show full text]
  • Continuous Testing for Devops Evolving Beyond Simple Automation
    Technical Whitepaper 1 Continuous Testing for DevOps Evolving Beyond Simple Automation INTRODUCTION DevOps represents a cultural shift that stresses collaboration be- on acceleration. Moreover, adopting a bona fide Continuous Testing tween the business, developers, and IT professionals. Software test process (more than just automated tests running regularly) helps automation can enhance these connections and help organizations promote all of the core pillars of DevOps: Culture, Automation, Lean, achieve desired SDLC acceleration, but it’s important to recognize Metrics, and Sharing. that automation is just one piece of the DevOps puzzle. In this paper, we’ll explore why and how Continuous Testing’s real- Since testing is often one of the greatest constraints in the SDLC, time objective assessment of an application’s business risks is a optimizing quality processes to allow testing to begin earlier, as well critical component of DevOps. as shrink the amount of testing required, can have a marked impact DEVOPS PRINCIPLES There are several key pieces to understanding DevOps revolutions and they are often brought about by a compelling event at an organization, such as a shift to agile. As organizations start to move into an agile development methodology, they start to uncover other processes that can be accelerated, such as delivery by DevOps and testing by Continuous Testing. The acceleration that is set in motion via agile makes it necessary to accelerate the release schedule. In order to ensure a successful release, an organization must adopt continuous testing to make sure the conveyer belt does not break down. The modernization maturity model has these three distinct phases: AGILE Agile software development is a different way of thinking about approaching the challenge of development time.
    [Show full text]
  • Accelerate Software Innovation Through Continuous Quality
    Accelerate Software Innovation Through Continuous Quality 1 Software quality is recognized as the #1 issue IT executives are trying to mitigate. Enterprise organizations strive to accelerate the delivery of a compelling user experience to their customers in order to drive revenue. Software quality is recognized as the #1 issue IT executives are trying to mitigate. QA teams know they have issues and are actively looking for solutions to save time, increase quality, improve security, and more. The most notable difficulties are in identifying the right areas to test, the availability of flexible and reliable test environments and test data, and the realization of benefits from automation. You may be facing many challenges with delivering software to meet the high expectations for quality, cost, and schedule driven by the business. An effective software testing strategy can address these issues. If you’re looking to improve your software quality while achieving your business goals, Parasoft can help. With over 30 years of making testing easier for our customers, we have the innovation you need and the experience you trust. Our extensive continuous quality suite spans every testing need and enables you to reach new heights. 3 QUALITY-FIRST APPROACH You can’t test quality into an application at the end of the software development life cycle (SDLC). You need to ensure that your software development process and practices put a priority on quality- driven development and integrate a comprehensive testing strategy to verify that the application’s functionality meets the requirements. Shift testing left to the start of your development process to bring quality to the forefront.
    [Show full text]
  • Accelerate Your Digital Transformation with Continuous API Testing
    Accelerate Your Digital Transformation with Continuous API Testing Continuously Improve DevOps, Agile Development, and CI/CD Pipelines with Continuous API Testing Powered by Contents Executive Summary 3 Quality-at-Speed 5 The Journey to Continuous API Testing 7 CI/CD Toolchain 9 Product Overview: API Fortress 10 Key Benefits 10 Competitive Edge: Continuous API Quality 12 How API Fortress Works 14 Core Features Basic Use Case 15 Advanced Use Case - “The Developer Flow” 16 API Risk Assessment 18 Contact Us Accelerate Your Digital Transformation with Continuous API Testing 2 Executive Summary Companies are being pushed to transform and innovate faster than ever. The need to stay ahead of new startups and technologies is leading to a mass shift in how work is done. This is best evidenced by the 36 60 percent spike from 2015 to 2017 in the adoption of Agile Development at enterprises according to Forrester. This has signaled a “critical mass realization” of the need for immediate digital 40 transformation. CIO senior writer, Clint Boulton, states, “Digital transformation [can be defined] as a euphemism for [a CIO’s] modernization efforts: 2017 moving from legacy architectures, on-premises systems and waterfall development to API-driven 20 microservices, the cloud and agile1.” At the heart of digital transformation is speed—the 2015 acceleration of release cycles for software features and APIs. With faster releases, developers can plan and build digital products in a nimble fashion that Widespread Adoption of responds more promptly to constantly changing Agile Development business cases. After all, customer preferences and loyalties are less stable than ever, and innovative competitors can disrupt instantly.
    [Show full text]
  • Automate Your Jenkins CI/CD Pipeline with Automated REST and SOAP
    API Fortress for Jenkins CI/CD Pipelines Automate your Jenkins CI/CD Pipeline with Automated REST and SOAP API Testing Deploy API Fortress for Jenkins CI/CD pipeline on- premises or hybrid cloud using Kubernetes or Docker. Or use the API Fortress API testing SaaS platform. Web Mobile App API Fill the Gap in Your Build Jenkins CI/CD Pipeline In just minutes, incorporate continuous API testing Test powered by API Fortress into your CI/CD pipeline. Deploy API Fortress on-premises or use our cloud platform. Test automation with immediate Deploy feedback directly into your Jenkins instance. Automate your Jenkins CI/CD Pipeline with Automated REST and SOAP API Testing With a CI/CD pipeline, the work of distributed teams come together in an automated flow to build, test, and deploy new code. That means rewriting the rules of how releases are built and tested. One of the first things that the Jenkins wiki (Jenkins Best Practices) tells newcomers to CI/CD is that “unit testing is often not enough to provide confidence [of desired quality].” The wiki then talks about the necessity to automate API testing throughout the lifecycle to ensure that all distributed teams are continually working with good services and data. Let’s take a closer look at those two stipulations of a CI/CD pipeline: 1. UI Testing Isn’t Enough: In our eBook, Nine Bugs That UI 2. Run API Testing Continuously: CI/CD pipelines produce Testing Could Not Diagnose, we tell nine horror stories from iterative releases so that services and mobile apps can real customers of API Fortress involving API vulnerabilities evolve quickly without increasing the number of bugs or and bugs that UI testing did not detect early in the lifecycle, vulnerabilities released.
    [Show full text]
  • API Testing Guide an Automated Approach to API Testing Transformation
    API Testing Guide An automated approach to API testing transformation. From Monolith to Microservice The consumerization of IT has changed the way we write applications today. Instead of building a single, monolithic system that is installed on a server in a back office or call center, modern When testing APIs, testers are faced with applications are scattered within mobile devices and web browsers numerous discrete units of work. Some so users can gain access to services at anytime from anywhere. of these APIs may have been created by a third party, while the possible And modern applications are no longer self-contained; they are ordering and combinations of different composed of multiple service components that are tied together versions of APIs can cause the number of at runtime. Therefore, the end-user experience is not powered by combinations that need to be tested to the elegant UIs we all use, but by APIs that facilitate interactions skyrocket to an impossible number. between code modules, applications and back-end IT systems. The ability to identify these combinations Because of this, the way we test must change. Quality assurance and then reduce them to a realistic (QA) and development teams must expand their capacity to test number without compromising quality each layer of the application, as well as the end-to-end business requires testers to adopt a transactions. Modern applications then require comprehensive API new model-based approach and invest in testing in addition to traditional UI testing. But API testing presents automation technologies. many challenges for testers. It requires a new approach—one that is automated wherever possible and inherently data-driven.
    [Show full text]
  • Parasoft Soatest the INDUSTRY-LEADING API TESTING SOLUTION
    Parasoft SOAtest THE INDUSTRY-LEADING API TESTING SOLUTION TRY IT Mitigate the risk of Reduce the cost of developing high-quality software, without sacrificing time-to-market: Get a free trial of Parasoft accelerated delivery with SOAtest and start testing. efficient end-to-end test CONTINUOUS TESTING automation. Automate the execution of API, performance, https://software.parasoft.com/soatest and security tests as part of your continuous Parasoft SOAtest helps cut through the delivery pipeline, leveraging CI infrastructure complexity of testing omni/multi-channel such as Jenkins, Bamboo, TeamCity, and API TESTING FOR applications. It extends API testing with VSTS, to provide a faster feedback loop ENTERPRISE AND automation and mitigates the cost of for test development and management. re-work by proactively adjusting your EMBEDDED library of tests as services change. AGILE Accelerate the feedback process required SOAtest efficiently transforms your in Agile methodology, by associating test existing test artifacts into security and • Automate complex scenarios cases with work items and integrating test performance tests, to increase re-usability across multiple endpoints (services, results with your requirements and issue and reduce redundancy, all while building databases, mobile, web UI, sensors, management systems, such as Jira, to a foundation of automated tests that ESBs, mainframes, etc.) from a single continuously validate your level of risk. intuitive user interface can be executed as part of Continuous Integration and DevOps
    [Show full text]
  • Python and Rest Api Example
    Python And Rest Api Example If banned or offended Jasper usually overdriven his ventail insolates impassably or coggles undesignedly and impossibly, how unsustaining is Willard? Is Mace always enchained and Faeroese when jaculating some inns very eligibly and iteratively? Groggy and papery Yanaton often parboils some sclerophylly purblindly or blesses boisterously. In the value of this url itself, jsonify is to provide executable code snippet is entered in python dictionary of how do this? Get back to actually write a ui as in our api and python rest api example with building and become immediately available, your application or not. Other software created solution for this example of products and news. Colorado population projects! Designed to python is used so it is the example snippet included twice or browser sends you can sometimes result in. Please try out in tgs web apis which is older api and example python rest api key is a sample rest? Check for restful features of json and application server has two entries in. Rest api gateway configurations are created user enters new to. Application but for example. In python file directly from flask_restful import flask simpler and google cloud pak for it meets our application while fetch information that will do so. Ip address so you can give us to. In other requirements, rest python api and example, if we expose to. If you are normally you want you can do this example snippet included twice or restful api, rest api to change without having a development. Self taught software and examples in python, a developer productivity tools to get method will be used for? In handy later, such as a web service or update, while fetch tokens from tutorials and rest? From remote server and rest.
    [Show full text]
  • Agile Methods: Testing Challenges, Solutions & Tool Support
    Agile Methods: Testing Challenges, Solutions & Tool Support Attique Ur Rehman Ali Nawaz Muhammad Abbas Department of Computer and Department of Computer and Department of Computer and Software Engineering, CEME, Software Engineering, CEME, Software Engineering, CEME, National University of Sciences and National University of Sciences and National University of Sciences and Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan [email protected] [email protected]. [email protected] e.edu.pk edu.pk ABSTRACT methodology is rapid and we therefore opt this methodology for rapid development of software so taking out time for Agile development is conventional these days and with the comprehensive testing is difficult. Research has shown that agile passage of time software developers are rapidly moving from methodology does not provides you this time for testing. We this Waterfall to Agile development. Agile methods focus on study will identify the major challenges which may arise during delivering executable code quickly by increasing the agile testing and they can relate to the management of testing or responsiveness of software companies while decreasing can relate to the implementation of testing. The challenges can development overhead and consider people as the strongest pillar come at the organizational level between teams or can they can of software development. As agile development overshadows occur for the specific product. We also propose the solution for Waterfall methodologies for software development, it comes up those challenges in light of the tools. with some distinct challenges related to testing of such software. Our study is going to discuss the challenges this approach has In this paper we have done a research about the challenges that stirred up.
    [Show full text]
  • AN INSIGHT INTO MICROSERVICES TESTING STRATEGIES Arvind Sundar, Technical Test Lead
    WHITE PAPER AN INSIGHT INTO MICROSERVICES TESTING STRATEGIES Arvind Sundar, Technical Test Lead Abstract The ever-changing business needs of the industry necessitate that technologies adopt and align themselves to meet demands and, in the process of doing so, give rise to newer techniques and fundamental methods of architecture in software design. In the context of software design, the evolution of “microservices” is the result of such an activity and its impact percolates down to the teams working on building and testing software in the newer schemes of architecture. This white paper illustrates the challenges that the testing world has to deal with and the effective strategies that can be envisaged to overcome them while testing for applications designed with a microservices architecture. The paper can serve as a guide to anyone who wants an insight into microservices and would like to know more about testing methodologies that can be developed and successfully applied while working within such a landscape. Introduction Microservices attempt to streamline the key; as is a good knowledge of how to go software architecture of an application about testing at each stage of the test life by breaking it down into smaller units cycle. More often than not, the traditional surrounding the business needs of methods of testing have proven to be the application. The benefits that are ineffective in an agile world where changes expected out of doing so include creating are dynamic. The inclusion of independent systems that are more resilient, easily micro-units that have to be thoroughly scalable, flexible, and can be quickly and tested before their integration into the independently developed by individual larger application only increases the sets of smaller teams.
    [Show full text]