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[Home](/)[Glossary](/glossary)API Security[Back to Glossary](/glossary)API Security
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The practice of protecting APIs from threats and vulnerabilities, covering authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and input validation.

methodologyAPIweb security

API security encompasses the strategies, practices, and tools used to protect Application Programming Interfaces from misuse and attack. As modern applications increasingly rely on APIs (REST, GraphQL, gRPC) for communication between services, API security has become a critical discipline. The OWASP API Security Top 10 identifies the most critical API-specific risks.

Key API security concerns include: broken object-level authorization (API-specific IDOR), broken authentication (weak or missing auth on API endpoints), excessive data exposure (APIs returning more data than the client needs), lack of rate limiting (enabling brute-force and DoS), mass assignment (accepting unexpected fields that modify server-side data), and injection vulnerabilities specific to API query languages like GraphQL.

API security requires a different approach than traditional web security because APIs lack the UI layer that often provides implicit structure and validation. Every API endpoint is a direct interface to business logic and data.

How APVISO tests for this: APVISO's agents excel at API security testing. The recon agent discovers API endpoints through documentation files, JavaScript analysis, and intelligent path fuzzing. The pentester agent then tests each endpoint for authentication, authorization, injection, and business logic vulnerabilities using AI-powered payload generation.

Related Terms
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[OWASP Top 10](/glossary/owasp-top-10)[Broken Access Control](/glossary/broken-access-control)[Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR)](/glossary/idor)

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