API Security Tools: Threat Protection vs. Testing & 8 Tools to Know

What Are API Security Tools? 

API security tools are software solutions designed to protect application programming interfaces (APIs) from threats and breaches. Thesy provide functionalities like authentication, encryption, threat detection, and security testing. 

By scanning and evaluating the traffic to and from APIs, these tools help identify security vulnerabilities, support their remediation, and prevent unauthorized access and data breaches.

API security tools are important for organizations that rely on APIs for seamless integration and data exchange. They help safeguard APIs from common vulnerabilities and attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. This ensures uninterrupted and secure API operations.

Types of API Security Tools 

API Threat Protection Tools

API threat protection tools focus on preventing malicious attacks on APIs. They continuously monitor API traffic to identify and block potential threats in real time. By employing advanced algorithms and threat detection techniques, these tools can detect unusual patterns indicative of cyber attacks. This is a reactive approach, which can mitigate risks as they happen.

In addition to threat detection, these tools provide insights through detailed analytics and reports, enabling developers to understand attack vectors and strengthen API security.

Pros and cons of threat protection tools:

• Pros: Threat protection tools provide real-time threat detection and prevention, which is important to identifying and blocking threats. This is a last line of defense against cyber attacks, ensuring the availability of APIs and protecting the sensitive data they hold.
• Cons: These tools can sometimes generate false positives, leading to unnecessary alerts and potentially hindering legitimate API traffic. Additionally, the complexity and cost of deploying and maintaining advanced threat protection solutions can be prohibitive for smaller organizations.

Related content: Read our guide to API attacks

API Security Testing Tools

API security testing tools are designed to identify vulnerabilities in APIs before they can be exploited by attackers. These tools simulate cyber attacks on APIs to test their resilience against common and advanced security threats. By doing so, developers can pinpoint and rectify vulnerabilities, strengthening the API's security posture.

These testing tools come in various forms, including static analysis tools, dynamic analysis tools, and interactive application security testing (IAST) solutions. They help ensure APIs are secure by design and securely deployed in production.

Pros and cons of API security testing tools:

• Pros: API security testing tools are proactive, uncovering vulnerabilities early in the development process, when they are the easiest to remediate. By scanning API code and simulating attacks at runtime, these tools help in identifying potential weaknesses, enabling developers to fortify APIs against real-world threats.
• Cons: Security testing tools can be complex to use, requiring specialized knowledge in cybersecurity. In addition, automated testing might miss context-specific vulnerabilities, making it necessary to complement tools with manual security assessments.

Learn how Pynt overcomes these challenges. Pynt provides a developer-friendly API security testing solution that integrates with familiar tools like Postman and uses functional tests to perform context aware testing.

API Threat Protection Tools 

1. Salt Security

Salt Security is a suite of tools for securing critical APIs against cyber threats at runtime. It has two core components: an API Posture Governance engine and an AI-driven Behavioral Threat Protection system.

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Key features:

• API posture governance: Aggregates and consolidates API inventories, providing insights into the security posture of each API. This feature allows for the rapid creation of custom policies using out-of-the-box templates.
• Behavioral threat protection: Through continuous monitoring of user behavior over extended periods, identifies and mitigates prolonged API attack attempts. It identifies common API attacks, preventing sensitive data exposure and accelerating incident response.
• Remediation of exploited vulnerabilities: Uses insights gained from minor successes of bad actors in real-time to offer precise remediation insights. It supports testing APIs in pre-production and fine-tuning of simulations, enabling teams to share and implement remediation strategies.
• Adaptive Intelligence: Collects extensive two-way API data, including requests, responses, and a variety of behavioral attributes, then uses ML models to analyze API activity over months. This approach provides aggregated discovery of endpoints and insights into usage patterns.

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2. Traceable

Traceable's API security platform offers context-aware security measures designed to protect APIs across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). This platform focuses on security posture management, threat protection, and threat management, aiming to provide a complete security solution from the development phase through to deployment.

Key features:

• Discovery and security posture management: Automates the discovery of APIs, identifying active APIs as well as those that are unknown, shadow, orphaned, or outdated. It updates this discovery in real time, offering visibility into the API ecosystem of an organization. This feature also maps application topologies and data flows, including the connectivity between edge APIs, internal services, and data stores.
• Threat protection: Implements real-time detection and defense mechanisms against API attacks and misuse, capable of identifying where and how unauthorized access to sensitive data occurs. It analyzes the flow of transactions within applications to enable quick intervention against data breaches or exploitations of software vulnerabilities.
• Threat management: Provides a data lake for security and application flow analytics, supporting security operations centers (SOCs) and security analysts in their efforts to detect hidden threats. It facilitates the tracking of suspicious user activities, the conducting of post-mortem security incident analyses, and the acceleration of incident response procedures.
• Protection across the SDLC: Addresses API vulnerabilities throughout the SDLC by offering tools for identifying risks in pre-production, conducting rapid scans to ensure security without slowing down innovation, and generating remediation insights for developers to secure their APIs more effectively.

3. Apigee Advanced API Security

Apigee Advanced API Security, an add-on for Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform, monitors and protects APIs from security threats, including attacks by malicious clients and abuse. It performs continual monitoring of API traffic to identify and manage suspicious requests effectively. By analyzing API traffic, Advanced API Security detects unusual patterns that may indicate threats, and takes measures to defend critical APIs.

Advanced API Security integrates deeply into the Apigee platform, providing a robust defense mechanism against a variety of API-related security issues. This tool is available as a paid add-on, with options for both pay-as-you-go and subscription models.

Key features:

• Continuous monitoring and threat detection: Advanced API Security constantly monitors API traffic, identifying suspicious or abnormal patterns that suggest potential security threats.
• Configurations and standards compliance: Evaluates API configurations to ensure they adhere to security standards, providing recommendations for improvements to enhance security measures.
• Abuse detection and management: Utilizes machine learning algorithms to detect abuse such as API scraping and anomalies, allowing for prompt countermeasures.
• Security reports and risk assessment: Offers detailed security reports and risk assessments, calculating security scores for APIs and highlighting areas of concern with actionable insights.
• Security actions and alerts: Enables the creation of customized security actions, such as blocking requests from specific IP addresses identified as threats. Also, it users can set up alerts to notify of security events and changes in security status.

4. Noname Security

Noname Security provides an API security platform focused on proactively securing environments from API security vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and design flaws, while also protecting APIs from real-time attacks through automated detection and response.

Key features:

• API discovery: Automatically discovers APIs, domains, and related issues, building an API inventory. This capability extends to locating and cataloging every API regardless of its configuration or type, including HTTP, RESTful, GraphQL, and SOAP.
• Protect sensitive data: Protects sensitive and regulated data such as credit card information, health records, and social security numbers, ensuring compliance with standards like PCI DSS, GDPR, and HIPAA.
• API posture management: Assesses APIs and the broader infrastructure for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. This feature is designed to identify potential risks and provide a clear understanding of the organization’s attack surface.
• Runtime protection: Utilizing automated AI-based detection, the platform identifies and prevents real-time attacks, including data leakage, data tampering, policy violations, and suspicious behavior.

Best API Security Testing Tools

5. Pynt

Pynt is a cutting-edge automated API security testing platform designed to seamlessly integrate into modern development workflows, ensuring continuous and thorough security testing without manual effort. Pynt addresses the growing challenge of securing APIs by automating vulnerability detection and remediation in real-time, enabling organizations to safeguard their APIs at scale while maintaining rapid development cycles.

Key Features:

1. Seamless Integration with Development Tools: Pynt integrates directly with popular API testing frameworks like Postman, ReadyAPI, and CI/CD pipelines such as Jenkins, GitLab, and Azure DevOps. This allows for continuous security testing to be part of the development process, ensuring that every API or code change is automatically tested for vulnerabilities. Pynt’s seamless integration ensures minimal disruption to your existing workflow.
2. Automated, Context-Aware Security Testing: Unlike traditional tools that require manual intervention, Pynt automates the entire API security testing process. It generates context-aware security tests based on real-world API traffic, functional test scenarios, and changes in API or code functionality. This automation ensures real-time identification of vulnerabilities, helping developers address security risks without the need for constant security engineer involvement.
3. Focus on API-Specific Threats: Pynt is purpose-built for API-specific security threats, which are often overlooked by general-purpose security tools. These threats include:some text
   • Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA)
   • Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR)
   • Improper Rate Limiting
   • Broken Function Level Authorization (BFLA)

By focusing on these critical areas, Pynt helps organizations detect vulnerabilities that are particularly prevalent in APIs and pose significant security risks.

4. Real-Time Continuous Security in CI/CD: Pynt integrates smoothly into CI/CD environments, allowing security testing to occur with each API change, code commit, or functional test update. By embedding security directly into the continuous integration and deployment processes, Pynt ensures that security risks are caught and addressed early in the development lifecycle, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities reaching production.
5. Scalable and Automated API Discovery: One of the unique capabilities of Pynt is its ability to enhance API catalog discovery by automatically integrating sources like Swagger files and Postman collections. This allows security teams to maintain comprehensive visibility into all available API endpoints and ensure no endpoint is overlooked during security assessments.
6. Burp Suite Integration: Pynt extends the capabilities of Burp Suite by automating the generation of API-specific security tests, adding value to Burp’s powerful manual testing approach. By integrating Burp with Pynt, security teams can automate test creation, save time on manual configurations, and focus on high-level vulnerability analysis.

With Pynt, organizations gain access to scalable, automated API security testing that seamlessly fits into their existing development and security workflows. By automating vulnerability detection, enhancing API discovery, and integrating directly with key tools, Pynt ensures that APIs are continuously monitored, secure, and compliant, providing a robust defense against the ever-growing landscape of API threats.

Learn more about Pynt

6. ZAP (Formerly OWASP ZAP)

Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is a free, open-source penetration testing tool designed to identify vulnerabilities in web applications. Maintained by the Software Security Project (SSP), ZAP is engineered for flexibility and extensibility, making it suitable for a range of users, from developers to security specialists.

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Key features:

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• Cross-platform compatibility: Available for major operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS, as well as Docker. This wide compatibility ensures that ZAP can be used in diverse development and testing environments.
• Automated and manual scanning: Facilitates automated and manual scanning of web applications. The Quick Start tab simplifies the initiation of automated scans, while manual exploration is recommended for comprehensive coverage, including areas behind login pages or those requiring specific user input.
• Session persistence: Upon starting, ZAP offers the option to persist sessions, storing session information in a local database. This feature allows for the continuation of tests and analyses across multiple sessions, aiding in security assessments.
• Extensibility through add-ons: The ZAP Marketplace offers a variety of free add-ons, enhancing the tool's functionality. This extensibility allows users to tailor the tool, whether they require additional penetration testing features or support for specialized scenarios.

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7. Wallarm

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Wallarm is an API security platform offering all-rounded protection for APIs and web applications. It integrates security features to detect, protect, and respond to threats in real time, making it suitable for enterprises looking to safeguard their digital assets.

Key features:

1. API and Application Protection: Wallarm provides continuous monitoring and protection against API-specific threats such as API abuse, injections, and data exposure. Its deep integration with existing API infrastructures ensures that it can effectively safeguard various types of APIs, including REST and GraphQL.
2. Threat detection: Uses AI and machine learning to detect and block a range of attacks. This includes SQL injections, cross-site scripting (XSS), and zero-day vulnerabilities. 
3. Scalability and flexibility: Designed to scale with the growth of an organization’s infrastructure. Supports deployment in diverse environments, including cloud, on-premises, and hybrid setups.
4. API discovery and inventory: Automatically discovers APIs and continuously updates the API inventory. This helps organizations gain visibility into shadow and deprecated APIs, which could be potential security risks.
5. Compliance and reporting: Aids in maintaining compliance with industry standards such as PCI DSS, GDPR, and HIPAA. Offers detailed reporting and analytics, providing insights into API security posture and helping with regulatory compliance audits.

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8. Burp Suite

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Burp Suite is a web security testing tool, available in a Community edition with basic features and a Professional version for advanced users. Developed by PortSwigger, it is used by over 70,000 security professionals to accelerate application security testing for a variety of use cases.

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Key features:

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• Community edition: Offers an essential manual toolkit to start web security testing. It provides features for those new to security testing or with limited requirements for automated tools.
• Professional edition: For more advanced and faster web security testing,  incorporates automated tools and workflows designed to increase productivity. This version is tailored for professional testers with features aimed at handling busy workloads.
• Integrates automation and manual testing: Blends automated and semi-automated processes with manual testing capabilities. This integration allows users to uncover more vulnerabilities while saving time.

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Conclusion

API security tools are becoming a critical part of any organization’s security posture, with APIs increasingly serving as the backbone of modern software applications. These tools not only defend against threats that can compromise API integrity but also ensure that APIs operate securely throughout their lifecycle. 

By implementing these tools, organizations can protect sensitive data, maintain service availability, and foster trust with users. The ability to detect, test, prevent, and respond to API security threats is essential for any entity relying heavily on APIs for business operations.

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Learn more about Pynt for API security testing

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