Best Practices for securing a REST API / web service [closed]
IT Nursery
April 20, 2022
0
When designing a REST API or service are there any established best practices for dealing with security (Authentication, Authorization, Identity Management) ?
When building a SOAP API you have WS-Security as a guide and much literature exists on the topic. I have found less information about securing REST endpoints.
While I understand REST intentionally does not have specifications analogous to WS-* I am hoping best practices or recommended patterns have emerged.
Any discussion or links to relevant documents would be very much appreciated.
If it matters, we would be using WCF with POX/JSON serialized messages for our REST API’s/Services built using v3.5 of the .NET Framework.
18 s 18
There is a great checklist found on Github:
Authentication
Don’t reinvent the wheel in Authentication, token generation, password storage. Use the standards.
Use Max Retry and jail features in Login.
Use encryption on all sensitive data.
JWT (JSON Web Token)
Use a random complicated key (JWT Secret) to make brute forcing the token very hard.
Don’t extract the algorithm from the payload. Force the algorithm in the backend (HS256 or RS256).
Make token expiration (TTL, RTTL) as short as possible.
Don’t store sensitive data in the JWT payload, it can be decoded easily.
OAuth
Always validate redirect_uri server-side to allow only whitelisted URLs.
Always try to exchange for code and not tokens (don’t allow response_type=token).
Use state parameter with a random hash to prevent CSRF on the OAuth authentication process.
Define the default scope, and validate scope parameters for each application.
Access
Limit requests (Throttling) to avoid DDoS / brute-force attacks.
Use HTTPS on server side to avoid MITM (Man In The Middle Attack)
Use HSTS header with SSL to avoid SSL Strip attack.
Input
Use the proper HTTP method according to the operation: GET (read), POST (create), PUT/PATCH (replace/update), and DELETE (to delete a record), and respond with 405 Method Not Allowed if the requested method isn’t appropriate for the requested resource.
Validate content-type on request Accept header (Content Negotiation) to allow only your supported format (e.g. application/xml, application/json, etc) and respond with 406 Not Acceptable response if not matched.
Validate content-type of posted data as you accept (e.g. application/x-www-form-urlencoded, multipart/form-data, application/json, etc).
Validate User input to avoid common vulnerabilities (e.g. XSS, SQL-Injection, Remote Code Execution, etc).
Don’t use any sensitive data (credentials, Passwords, security tokens, or API keys) in the URL, but use standard Authorization header.
Use an API Gateway service to enable caching, Rate Limit policies (e.g. Quota, Spike Arrest, Concurrent Rate Limit) and deploy APIs resources dynamically.
Processing
Check if all the endpoints are protected behind authentication to avoid broken authentication process.
User own resource ID should be avoided. Use /me/orders instead of /user/654321/orders.
Don’t auto-increment IDs. Use UUID instead.
If you are parsing XML files, make sure entity parsing is not enabled to avoid XXE (XML external entity attack).
If you are parsing XML files, make sure entity expansion is not enabled to avoid Billion Laughs/XML bomb via exponential entity expansion attack.
Use a CDN for file uploads.
If you are dealing with huge amount of data, use Workers and Queues to process as much as possible in background and return response fast to avoid HTTP Blocking.
