API Security Guides

    Comprehensive guides to help developers and security engineers understand, implement, and maintain secure APIs.

    API Authentication

    Learn how to secure your APIs with modern authentication methods like JWT, OAuth 2.0, and API Keys.

    API Authorization

    Understand the different levels of API authorization and how to implement them effectively.

    API Trust Boundaries

    Discover the hidden risks of assuming data from trusted sources is inherently safe.

    API Security Tools

    Explore the different layers of API security tools and what each can and cannot protect against.

    API Security Checklist

    A practical checklist covering authentication, rate limiting, object-level authorization, SSRF, schema validation, and logging.

    OWASP API Top 10 Categories

    These categories exist to highlight the most common and highest-impact API security risks seen in real systems. Use this list as a roadmap to publish and organize your upcoming OWASP-focused guides.

    API1:2023 - Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA)

    APIs expose object identifiers, and missing object-level access checks let attackers access other users' data.

    API2:2023 - Broken Authentication

    Weak auth flows and token handling allow account takeover, impersonation, and unauthorized API usage.

    API3:2023 - Broken Object Property Level Authorization

    Lack of field-level controls can expose sensitive properties or allow unauthorized updates through mass assignment.

    API4:2023 - Unrestricted Resource Consumption

    Missing limits on requests, payloads, or expensive operations can cause abuse, outages, and denial of service.

    API5:2023 - Broken Function Level Authorization

    Inconsistent role and permission checks let users invoke admin or privileged API functions they should not access.

    API6:2023 - Unrestricted Access to Sensitive Business Flows

    Critical business actions without anti-automation controls can be abused at scale for fraud and business logic attacks.

    API7:2023 - Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF)

    APIs that fetch remote resources can be manipulated to access internal services and metadata endpoints.

    API8:2023 - Security Misconfiguration

    Insecure defaults, verbose errors, and poor hardening create easy attack paths and accidental data exposure.

    API9:2023 - Improper Inventory Management

    Unknown, old, or shadow API versions remain exposed and unprotected when inventory and lifecycle controls are weak.

    API10:2023 - Unsafe Consumption of APIs

    Trusting third-party APIs without validation, segmentation, or resilience controls introduces supply-chain risk.