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What is API Security?
API security is the discipline of protecting APIs — the interfaces that allow software systems to communicate — from unauthorized access, data breaches, abuse, and downtime. As organizations expose more business logic through APIs (internal, partner, and public), the API layer has become the primary target for attackers. Gartner predicts that API attacks will become the most frequent attack vector for enterprise applications, surpassing web application attacks.
OWASP API Security Top 10
The OWASP API Security Top 10 defines the most critical API vulnerabilities: Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA/IDOR), Broken Authentication, Broken Object Property Level Authorization, Unrestricted Resource Consumption, Broken Function Level Authorization, Unrestricted Access to Sensitive Business Flows, Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF), Security Misconfiguration, Improper Inventory Management, and Unsafe Consumption of APIs. Each category represents a distinct class of vulnerability with well-documented real-world exploits in production APIs.
Core Controls
Effective API security requires multiple defensive layers: strong authentication (OAuth 2.0, API keys with short TTLs, mTLS for service-to-service), granular authorization with scope enforcement, input validation and schema enforcement to reject malformed requests, rate limiting and quota management to prevent abuse, threat detection for anomalous access patterns, and continuous API inventory management to ensure no undocumented 'shadow APIs' exist. Logging and monitoring must capture every request for forensics and compliance.
API Security vs Traditional Security
Traditional perimeter security tools — firewalls, WAFs, IDS/IPS — were designed for HTML web traffic and lack the ability to inspect API-specific attack patterns like BOLA, parameter tampering, or business logic abuse. API security requires tools that understand the semantics of API requests: what a 'normal' request looks like for a given endpoint, what data should and should not appear in a response, and how to detect privilege escalation patterns that look structurally valid but violate business rules.
How G8KEPR Secures APIs
G8KEPR's API security engine combines a reverse proxy with a behavioral analysis layer. Every API request is authenticated, schema-validated against an OpenAPI specification, and inspected for threat patterns from a library of 1,500+ attack signatures covering the OWASP API Top 10 and AI-specific threats. Rate limiting is enforced per client, per endpoint, and per business rule. Anomaly detection baselines normal traffic patterns and alerts on deviations in real time, with full audit logs for SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance.
Explore G8KEPR API Security
See how G8KEPR puts API Security controls into practice — from real-time detection to compliance documentation.
Explore G8KEPR API SecurityRelated Terms
AI Gateway
An AI gateway is a proxy layer that sits between applications and LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.), handling request routing, cost tracking, rate limiting, semantic caching, and key management across multiple AI providers.
API SecurityAPI Rate Limiting
API rate limiting controls the number of requests a client can make to an API within a defined time window. It protects APIs from abuse, DDoS attacks, and resource exhaustion while ensuring fair usage across all consumers.
API SecurityZero Trust API Security
Zero Trust API Security applies the principle of "never trust, always verify" to API traffic. Every request — regardless of origin — is authenticated, authorized, and validated before being processed, eliminating the concept of a trusted network perimeter.