API security

API security platforms help teams discover, assess, and protect APIs across development and production. As organisations move to microservices, mobile backends, and partner integrations, APIs become the primary interface to data and business logic — and a common path for account takeover, data exposure, and abuse. The challenge is that APIs change quickly, are often owned by many teams, and are not always fully documented or consistently governed.

Standalone controls like WAFs and gateways can help, but they don’t usually provide a connected view of API risk. A WAF is tuned for generic web threats. An API gateway enforces authentication, routing, and rate limits, but it may not tell you which endpoints are undocumented, where sensitive fields are leaking, or which patterns look like enumeration and business logic abuse. API security sits above these point controls by adding API discovery, schema awareness, runtime analysis, and risk context.

Modern API security platforms often combine passive discovery (from traffic, logs, or gateways) with active assessment of API definitions and behaviours. The goal is to help security and engineering teams answer practical questions: what APIs exist, which ones are exposed, who owns them, what data they return, how they are actually used, and where broken authorisation or abusive usage creates real risk — not just isolated alerts.

7 Common Requirements in This Category

Technical buyers typically look for:

1. API Discovery and Inventory

Automatic discovery of APIs across environments — including public, private, and internal services — and identification of shadow, zombie, and deprecated APIs. Clear ownership mapping (service, repo, team), exposure level, and traffic activity so teams can prioritise what matters.

2. Spec and Schema Awareness

Support for OpenAPI/Swagger and other API definitions, with the ability to detect drift between documented schemas and observed behaviour. Coverage for modern API styles (e.g. REST, GraphQL, and gRPC where relevant), including undocumented endpoints, methods, and parameters that expand the attack surface.

3. Runtime Visibility and Behavioural Detection

Analysis of API traffic to detect abuse patterns like enumeration, credential stuffing, token replay/misuse, injection attempts, and high-risk sequences that indicate business logic abuse. Baselining that helps reduce noise, with enough evidence (requests, parameters, identities, timing) to support investigation.

4. AuthN/AuthZ and Identity Context

Visibility into how APIs are accessed (API keys, OAuth, JWTs, service identities) and where authorisation breaks down. Detection of issues such as broken object level authorisation, overly broad scopes/roles, risky trust relationships, and inconsistent enforcement across services and environments.

5. Data Exposure and Sensitive Field Awareness

Identification of sensitive data in requests and responses (PII, financial data, secrets), and detection of excessive data exposure or over-broad responses. Policy controls that align with privacy and compliance requirements, plus developer-friendly guidance on what to change.

6. Testing and Shift-Left Coverage

Where supported, integration into design/build workflows: spec linting, conformance checks, security testing of APIs, and CI/CD hooks to catch risky patterns before deployment. Practical feedback loops for engineering teams (clear diffs, owners, and recommended fixes), not just security findings.

7. Operational Fit, Enforcement, and Reporting

Deployment options that fit reality: out-of-band monitoring (mirrored traffic/logs), integration with existing gateways, or inline enforcement where appropriate. Integrations with SIEM/SOAR/ticketing, role-aware dashboards for security and engineering, and reporting that supports audits and executive updates (exposure trends, top abused APIs, MTTR by team).

With Cybermatch, API security platforms are compared against these criteria so teams can quickly see which vendors match their API footprint, architecture (gateway/service mesh/cloud), delivery practices, and risk priorities before investing in a PoC.