APIs: Securing the Stitching Connecting Applications
September 23, 2020
Security Boulevard
By Stan Wisseman

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are an essential enabler of innovation in today’s digitally driven world. Applications (or application components) can leverage APIs to connect to other apps and communicate autonomously. APIs are found in use by customer-facing, partner-facing and internal applications in support of mobile, SaaS and web applications.

A way of visualizing this change is to view web applications less as bedspreads and more as quilts, with APIs the stitching that holds the patchwork quilt blocks together. To complicate the matter, since typically several people work on a quilt together, they may use different types of thread and each of the patches is by nature, a different texture, has a different level of porosity and strength, and may even come from a different era. This is vitally important in that the quilts we’ve now created have an attack surface for our applications of epic proportions.

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