API security solutions

Protect against shadow APIs, data exposure, and other API threats with API defense-in-depth
API security solutions illustration

Consumers and end users continue to expect more dynamic web and mobile experiences — powered by APIs. However, the faster that APIs proliferate (sometimes without security oversight), the greater the risk to the service’s underlying infrastructure. Purpose-built API security solutions mitigate vulnerability exploits, API errors, DoS and DDoS attacks, API fraud, and other emerging API threats.

API security solutions illustration
OVERVIEW

What is API security?

Modern businesses use APIs to power fast, compelling digital experiences. However, APIs — which now comprise more than half of the Internet traffic processed by Cloudflare — introduce new risks by allowing outside parties to access an application. This problem is heightened by faster continuous deployment cycles, if security processes are overlooked.

API security protects against API-centric attacks that can expose application logic, disrupt app performance, reveal sensitive data, and other threats. Compared to more common web application security services, API security solutions deliver deeper business context, discovery methods, and authentication and authorization verification controls.

Shadow APIs

Many organizations lack a complete inventory of their APIs. Such “shadow APIs” can lead to data exposure, unpatched vulnerabilities, lateral movement, and other risks.

Business logic-based fraud

Bot operators can directly attack the APIs behind workflows such as account creation, form fills, and payments to steal credentials and more.

Insecure AI-generated code

The rise in generative AI brings potential risks, including AI models’ APIs being vulnerable to attacks, as well as developers shipping flawed AI-generated code.

Key use cases

Protect APIs wherever they are hosted — without compromising developer innovation and productivity

Discover shadow APIs

Organizations cannot secure or manage an API if they do not know it exists. Discover all API endpoints, including shadow APIs, through machine learning and session identifier models.

Mitigate API abuse

Bots and DDoS attacks increasingly exploit APIs — which are typically less protected than web apps — to steal credentials and money. Prevent API abuse by allowing only validated, good API traffic.

Detect data leakage

Vulnerabilities in organizations’ own APIs or with third-party API integrations can lead to unauthorized data access. Consolidate data leakage protection across all SaaS apps, web apps, and APIs.

Track and analyze API performance

API errors can signal cyber attacks or app performance issues — ultimately preventing legitimate traffic. Understand how APIs are truly performing, then quickly take the most appropriate action.

KEY CAPABILITIES

One integrated web application and API security platform delivers defense-in-depth for APIs

Built-in authentication

Block requests from illegitimate clients. Authenticate and validate API traffic with mTLS certificates, JSON web tokens (JWT), API keys, and OAuth 2.0 tokens.

Detect API abuse

Baseline API traffic and stop abuse with per-endpoint session-based rate limiting suggestions and GraphQL denial of service (DoS) protections.

Schema validation

Many API breaches happen due to permissive schemas (the metadata defining a valid API request/response). Schema validation blocks malformed requests and HTTP anomalies to accept only valid API requests.

Protect sensitive data

Detect sensitive data within API responses leaving your server origin, and receive alerts per-endpoint.

Ready to protect APIs without compromising innovation?

API security solutions FAQs