API Authentication & Authorization for More Security

API Authentication & Authorization for More Security

SUMMARY: When dealing with APIs the key to a secure system is ensuring the authentication and authorization features of your API system are working.

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Why is authentication and authorization important when handling API security? APIs allow limited access to users and servers and, as such, require tight security. Authorization and authentication procedures help ensure the right people access your servers.

Authentication ascertains the identity of the user, and authorization verifies they have the permissions needed to access what they are requesting to access. These two are interdependent processes help provide tighter security within a platform.

Authentication versus authorization.

While authentication will determine if the user is who they claim to be, authorization will ensure you only access what you need to, and the rest of the data will be accessible.

While logging into an account, passwords, security questions, and facial recognition will be used to validate your credentials.

Then by ticking that you agree to follow the program’s policy and rules, you are granted access and limited privileges. That is an example of how authentication and authorization work hand in hand.

By default, the platform will use the EGO user account database. The user database account will include passwords that provide API authentication and, in the end, provide authorization.

User accounts Each user account is affiliated to a consumer who has a list of user accounts that they have access to but can only use one user account to run the workload. All the workload that will run under that user account will run under one operating system.

User roles and permissions Whichever authentication method is used, the platform will use role-based authorization to control the access of the consumer to the system objects.

Where an end-user application is used, SAML authentication is popularly applied. It is a widely used standard that provides the capability to authenticate and authorize an identity on different entities. SAML is considered as the de-facto standard when it comes to providing single sign-on (SSO). The use of SAML on SSO allows for seamless access to the API through API management that is integrated with SAML. The two integration provide the consumer access to the backend API through; I. Access to tokens that are exchanged by the SAML and the API management. The consumer will interact directly with SAML. II. Use of API management platform. The platform will federate to a SAML provider to authenticate the access to the API. In authorization, it is possible to access a site without giving out the user’s password. The site will give limited access to the data that the user needs. This kind of authorization is known as OAuth; it requires an authorization framework to be available.

There are two flows of OAuth; two-legged and three-legged flow. Both grant access to the API, but while two-legged flow will involve no user interaction, the three-legged flow relay on user interaction with the authorization server. The user will have to authenticate themselves to be granted access to the API. The three-legged flow is more secure as it redirects the end-user to authenticate themselves in the client app.

Access to information is limited and protected by these two. If you can’t prove your identity, you cannot be able to access resources. You will be denied access even after proving your identity if you are not an authorized user for that resource.