API security automation: Secure your APIs before deploying

Pynt case study

API security automation: Secure your APIs before deploying

API security

As organizations move to a microservice-based architecture, the number of APIs used in testing and production environments rapidly increases. This provides several benefits such as efficient application scaling, but at the same time, there is also an increase in security risk, as the attack surface increases. An attack surface refers to the available points of attack. So in a micro-service-based application, there are 100s of APIs that increase the attack surface.

Is your team ready for most common API Security Threats - Birdview Logic

Nowadays, development teams are rushing from deployment to deployment, which causes the security aspect to nearly get neglected. There may not even be a security expert to test the application before release. This also means that there is going to be a high-security risk. According to OWSAP's top 10 security vulnerabilities in 2019, most of the security risks have been due to the developers writing insecure code.

Shift Left

Since most of these security vulnerabilities are just bugs in your code, the fastest and cheapest way to fix them is to solve them during development itself. This is part of an idea known as shifting left. The shift left approach to development essentially means, running security tests during the development process itself, rather than completing development, and then running the security tests. Ultimately, shifting left helps to speed up application releases, without sacrificing security.

Why Shift-Left Testing? Pros and Cons

However, shifting left can be difficult to adopt as most security testing tools were created with security professionals in mind. This makes it difficult for developers to use the tools, as they lack domain expertise in terms of security, and it also has a huge learning curve.

What is Pynt

Pynt is a free API security testing solution, that empowers developers and testers to build secure APIs from the very start of the development process. Its developer-first approach allows organizations to secure the assets behind their APIs before they are released into production, ensuring that their products are secure at their most vulnerable components - APIs.

Effortless API security testing

Pynt’s API solution carries out automated hacks of your APIs to find the most critical issues and zero-day vulnerabilities in less than two minutes, with no configuration required, and seamlessly integrates into CI/CD pipelines. Pynt can be used via postman, as a GitHub action, or using a CLI wrapper. Its dynamic security testing covers all the OWASP API Top 10 security vulnerabilities and retrieves results about your overall security in just a few minutes.

By providing an automated API security integrated solution, integrated into the developer's tools itself, it becomes easier to analyze functional tests context so that the APIs are covered for security, effortlessly.

Conclusion

API security can get neglected to achieve a faster release cycle, but this can cause a lot of security vulnerabilities which can cause huge problems in the future. A great approach to keeping applications secure, without sacrificing speed, is to adopt a shift left approach.

Pynt is helping developers adopt a left-shift approach to keep the APIs secure. It is easy to get started with, either by using a GitHub action, or postman and effortlessly integrating it into your CI/CD pipelines.

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