How Curefit solved API security using Akto

Working in the field of information security for more than ten years now, I have faced many challenges myself as an individual as well on a team front. Many tools and technologies, both open source and heavily paid, are available in the market to perform dynamic and automated assessments for applications, networks, and even for cloud infrastructure. The result is that they provide many bugs, issues, and best practices that need to be followed while taking care of compliance.

However, API security and testing were an untouched domain for a very long time. Keeping in view of how the technology is evolving to use API calls as a backend for both Mobile as well as Web environment and where in general Central API calls will receive and distribute traffic in a microservices various other API calls, it becomes essential to have an automation tool which can help perform security testing.

The Problems

Even though API architecture has solved many problems and is helpful in a very speedy throughput of the application, a certain amount of complications come with it from a testing point of view.

In the case of a web application, one can look for all the webpages and the deep links inserted in the page to find all the possible targets to perform Security testing, however when it comes to API, it is very dynamic, and it depends a lot on developers to keep a collection of API in some central location, such as postman etc.

If the developers do not keep such a collection creates a massive problem for the security team to keep track of the exact target and the progress of testing done.

For developers, it is not a Priority to keep such a collection; however, from a security point of you, on the other hand, it becomes very critical to know what is your target list to test, how many API calls exist, what is the flow, what calls are being done internally and externally and can we perform an automation test on it as we do it on a web web page or a mobile application?

Our problems were close to the ones mentioned above. We did not have a centralized API collection of all the calls in our environment. We needed a tool which could collect all the API calls in a central place so that we could start testing each of them one by one, both manually and dynamically. This is how our journey started with Akto. Swapnil Sharma, Security Engineer at Curefit.