• Overview

API Testing

A foundational element of innovation in today’s app-driven world is the API (Application Programming Interfaces). 

From banks, retail and transportation to IoT, autonomous vehicles and smart cities, APIs are a critical part of modern mobile, SaaS and web applications. APIs are found in customer-facing, partner-facing and internal applications. By nature, APIs expose application logic and sensitive data such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and have increasingly become a target for attackers. Without secure APIs, rapid innovation would be impossible.

  • Challenges

Web application security vs API security

With the rapid rise of microservices and the rush to build more applications more quickly, APIs are in use more than ever to connect services and transfer data. However, with a growing number of smaller applications trying to communicate, APIs are becoming increasingly challenging to secure.

The implications of these risks have resulted in some of the most significant breaches recently.

  • Data exposure
  • Security misconfigurations
  • Insufficient logging and monitoring
  • Man in the Middle Attacks (MiTM)
  • Lack of resources
  • Authentication and authorisation 
  • Benefits Of Our Services

What Are Benefits Of API Testing

SecuriCentrix is a network and web application testing provider, helping organisations identify weaknesses that could enable sensitive details compromised by criminal attackers.

  • PCI DSS, ISO 27001, GDPR, POPIA
  • Security by design validation
  • Assess threats to the API
  • Identify potential data leakage
  • Scope

Approach

At SecuriCentrix, we have identified an API testing strategy for testing an API to better understand testing techniques.

  • Understand the functionality of the API program and clearly define the scope of the program.
  • Define input parameters for the API.
  • Ensure end to end functionality is tested.
  • Security

Web application security vs API security

While REST APIs have many similarities with web applications, there are also fundamental differences.

In traditional web applications, data processing is done on the server-side, and the resulting web page is then sent to client browsers to be rendered. Thus, the entry points to this, the entry points to the network architecture of the business were relatively few and straightforward to protect by setting up a web application firewall (WAF) in front of the application server.

Modern API-based applications are very different. More and more, the UI uses APIs to send and receive the data from the backend servers to provide the application’s functions. It is now the clients that do the rendering and maintain the state.