The modern world relies on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). They allow applications to communicate with each other, servers, and consumers to facilitate data sharing and simplify application development. Without them, the internet would be unrecognizable. However, APIs also present a considerable risk to organizations. If left unsecured, they can be a gateway for attackers to access critical data and services. Protecting APIs is extraordinarily important, but it can be expensive. With this in mind, here’s a list of the top open-source API security tools.
What is API Security?
Put simply, API security is the practice of protecting APIs from threats and vulnerabilities. It involves implementing measures to authenticate users, validate requests, prevent data breaches, and defend against all kinds of threats to APIs. By implementing effective API security, you ensure that only authorized users and systems can interact with your APIs and that your sensitive data is protected.
Why is API Security Important?
As noted, API security is crucial to society’s normal functioning. APIs play an essential role in everything from mobile banking to GPS to travel booking – and pretty much anything else you can think of. However, their criticality and ubiquity make them an attractive target for cybercriminals.
In the modern threat landscape, suffering an API attack is a matter of when, not if. Research published in Digit revealed that 55% of respondents suffered an API security incident in the past year alone. To make matters worse, 25% of respondents reported experiencing AI-enhanced API threats, which are harder to detect than more traditional attacks.
Like any other cyberattack, a successful API attack can have massive consequences. Operational disruption can severely impact an organization’s ability to do business – sometimes for weeks or even months – while legal and regulatory fines can reach millions of dollars. Ultimately, failing to implement effective API security could bring even the world’s largest organizations to their knees.
Our Top Open Source Tools for API Security
Unfortunately, some organizations feel API security is out of their price range. The short-sightedness of this mentality aside, the consequences of a breach will always be more costly than an API security program, and API security doesn’t even need to be expensive. There is a vast range of open source, freely available API security tools out there if you know where to look. Here are a few of our favorites.
API Firewall
Wallarm API Firewall is a lightweight, open-source solution designed to secure REST and GraphQL API endpoints in cloud-native environments. Using a positive security model, it validates API requests and responses against predefined OpenAPI and GraphQL schemas, blocking anything outside the specifications. API Firewall prevents data breaches by detecting malformed responses, securing endpoints with JWT validation, and allowing or blocking access based on IP lists. Supporting ModSecurity Rules and the OWASP Core Rule Set, it protects against a wide range of attacks. Written in Go for high performance, it has over 1 billion Docker Hub pulls since its 2021 release.
Awesome API Security
The Awesome API Security repository is a curated list of API security tools, frameworks, and resources dedicated to API security. It includes API vulnerability testing tools like Postman and OWASP ZAP, frameworks to help implement authentication mechanisms – including OAuth and OpenID Connect – and best practice guidelines and tutorials to help developers design secure APIs from the ground up.
Awesome API Security Essentials
Awesome API Security Essentials is designed to be a one-stop shop for developers, providing everything they need to implement comprehensive API security measures. It provides articles, tutorials, whitepapers, tools, libraries, and best practices for secure API design, emphasizing detailed explanations and use cases to enhance understanding and application.
GoTestWaf
GoTestWAF is a tool for simulating API and OWASP attacks to assess the effectiveness of web application security solutions, such as Web Application Firewalls (WAF), API security proxies, Intrusion Protection Systems (IPS), and API Gateways. It supports various attack types and various API protocols, including REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSockets, SOAP, XMLRPC, and more. Available as a Docker container, GoTestWAF generates a comprehensive PDF report detailing the performance of tested security solutions. An online version of the tool is also available for added convenience.
libDetection Library
Libdetection is an open-source library offering signature-free payload detection through syntax analysis and universal grammar theory. Introduced initially as a research project at Black Hat, it detects injections and command attacks, such as SQLi, without relying on signatures or attack samples.
JWT Heartbreaker
JWT Heartbreaker is a Burp Suite extension automatically detecting weak secrets in thousands of JWT tokens. It identifies JWTs in all proxied HTTP requests and analyzes them for vulnerabilities in their secrets. Licensed under GPL, this extension builds upon the functionality of JSON Web Tokens (JWT4B).
WallNet
WallNet is an open-source bidirectional recurrent neural network with an attention mechanism, pooling layers, and pipeline for Structured Query Language injection (SQLi) detection. It was developed using TensorFlow 1.11 and Python 3.6 and is designed to reduce false positives, negatively impacting DevSecOps workload and efficiency. It was demonstrated at BSideSF, during which the application of this methodology was illustrated, and the implementation of AI-based false-positive detection for SQL injection attacks was detailed.
OWASP Top Ten
The OWASP Top Ten, published by the Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP), lists the most critical security risks to web applications. It is widely recognized as a key resource for improving web application security by identifying and addressing common vulnerabilities. It is a starting point for organizations to prioritize and address these risks, fostering more secure application development and deployment.
Conclusion
For organizations with tight security budgets, open source tools like those listed above can be invaluable for securing APIs without breaking the bank. However, implementing the measures and tools included in these resources can be highly time-consuming. Wallarm’s Integrated App and API Security Platform does all this work for you, seamlessly protecting your entire API and web application portfolio in multi-cloud, cloud-native, and on-premises environments. Interested? Schedule a demo today.