API sprawl from a constantly expanding fabric of endpoints and integrations makes it impractical for security teams to identify and protect critical business logic using manual methods. APIs are increasingly distributed across heterogenous infrastructures, including hybrid and multicloud  environments that leverage data centers, public clouds, and edge sites—resulting in critical business logic being exposed outside the realm of centralized security controls. Additionally, because application development teams move swiftly to innovate, API calls can end up hidden deep within business logic and reference insecure code, making them difficult to protect. 

With such an emphasis on innovation speed, security is often left behind. Sometimes security is simply overlooked in the design of APIs themselves. Often, security is considered, but policy becomes misconfigured due to the nuanced complexity of maintaining application deployments that span multiple clouds and architectures. 

Since APIs are designed for machine-to-machine data exchange, many APIs represent a direct route to sensitive data, often without the same risk controls as input validation on user-facing web forms. Yet these endpoints are subject to the same attacks that plague web apps: namely vulnerability exploits, business logic abuse, and bypass of access controls that can lead to data breach, downtime, and account takeover (ATO).

Not  only should API endpoints be evaluated with the same risk controls as web applications—including code analysis, penetration testing, and threat modeling to mitigate the risk from business logic attacks—additional considerations are required to mitigate unintended risk from endpoints that are outside the purview of security teams or that have essentially been abandoned—as is the case with shadow and zombie APIs.

Because APIs are susceptible to many of the same attacks known to target web applications, API security incidents have been the cause of some of the highest-profile data breaches. Risks like weak authentication/authorization controls, misconfiguration, business logic abuse, and Server-side request forgery (SSRF) impact both web apps and APIs. Vulnerability exploits and abuse from bots and malicious automation are top concerns:

• Injection and Cross-site scripting (XSS) can lead to unauthorized access of data.
• Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) can disrupt critical, revenue generating services.
• Credential stuffing and other automated attacks can lead to compromise, data breach, and fraud.

Applications have moved toward an increasingly distributed and decentralized model, with APIs serving as the interconnection. Mobile apps and third-party integrations that increase business value have become table stakes for successfully competing in an online world. F5 Labs research details how APIs are a growing target as more industries adopt modern application architectures—in part because APIs are more structured and easier for attackers to work with.

Risk increases when APIs become widely distributed without a holistic governance strategy. This risk is exacerbated by a continuous application lifecycle process where applications and APIs are constantly changing over time due to integration with complex supply chains and automation via CI/CD pipelines.

The variety of interfaces and potential risk exposure means security teams need to protect the front door as well as all windows that represent the building blocks of modern and AI apps—proactively, dynamically, and continuously.

Advances  in machine learning make it possible to dynamically discover API endpoints and automatically map their interdependencies—both in testing and in production—providing a practical way to analyze API communication patterns over time and identify shadow or undocumented APIs that increase risk. 

Furthermore, continuous endpoint monitoring and analysis enable security baselines to be constructed autonomously, providing for real-time detection, automated risk scoring, and mitigation of malicious users without unnecessary increases to your security team's workload.

This  continuous and automated protection results in highly calibrated policies that can be applied consistently across all architectures, for all APIs, during all stages of the software development lifecycle—mitigating exploits, deterring business logic attacks, and enforcing schema, protocol compliance, and access control.

Enterprises need to modernize their legacy apps while simultaneously developing new user experiences by leveraging modern architectures and third-party integrations. A holistic governance strategy that protects APIs from the core to the cloud to the edge supports digital transformation while reducing known and unknown risks.

F5 solutions provide the flexibility to operate in any environment. Universal visibility and ML-based automated protections maximize efficacy and unburden security teams. F5 can consolidate pure-play/niche solutions and consistently secure hybrid and multicloud environments to improve resiliency and remediation.

Key considerations for deploying API security include:

1. Hybrid and multicloud support 
   Universal visibility and consistent policy enforcement reduces complexity, tool sprawl, and risk of misconfiguration, and increases speed to remediation.
   
   
2. Integration with existing dev processes
   Security teams can keep pace with the application lifecycle by proactively uncovering risk during testing, and integrating security policy into CI/CD pipelines via a native terraform registry.
   
   
3. Positive security model
   F5 solutions streamline policy with a positive security model that enforces schema using OpenAPI definitions, Swagger files, and zero-trust principles.
   
   
4. Automated defenses
   ML-based anomaly detection remediates vulnerability exploits, business logic abuse, and denial-of-service without burdening security teams with policy tuning across environments or excessive false positives.
   
   
5. Rich visualizations
   Security dashboards with drill-down support into API usage baselines help operators correlate insights and simplify incident response.


6. Security resilience
   Durable telemetry and highly-trained machine learning enable more efficient and effective security that keeps pace with the speed of digital business and mitigates emerging adversarial AI attacks.

F5 solutions protect APIs across the entire enterprise portfolio by continuously discovering and automatically protecting critical business logic and third-party integrations across clouds and architectures. 

A comprehensive and consistent security policy coupled with resilient ML-powered defenses allows organizations to align API security to digital strategy. This enables businesses to improve risk management, innovate with confidence, and streamline operations.

See F5 Distributed Cloud in action.