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API Gateways: Access Provisioning

Adrian Lane June 16, 2013 No Comments

What do we want? API Access! When do we want it? Now! I’s time to change your entire mindset. We’re talking about API security, but not for traditional APIs. API gateways are a response to the “open API” movement, and create a very different development environment. As we mentioned in our introduction, API gateways are an enabling technology, but likely not the way you think they are. Companies want to expose their services to a wide audience, but rather than design and build consumer offerings in-house they often provide API access to their services to contractors – and in many cases to the general programming community. For companies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube (Google), the trend is to allow third-party developers to extend and integrate these platforms to provide novel new user experiences. It’s a win/win: the company gets to leverage innovations from the third-party community, users get better apps, and developers get paid (the average force.com developer makes $392k/year for their work. It can be an almost free way to leverage the best ideas in the development world – you just have to accept the risk of random people groping around your services and data. Leveraging the community for innovation and pro bono development raises some new security problems – how can you control your API while actively making it available outside your company? Not that many years ago, companies wrestled with serving up data to consumers outside the firewall – letting them write code to run on top of proprietary systems is downright scary. To provision developer access, and to control what they can use and how, you need some form of API management framework. API gateways are this framework. From the developer’s perspective they function like a traditional development environment: they bundle a number of features under one umbrella to provide basic tools developers need and make API integration as simple as possible. For the API provider, rich and accessible services encourage developers. The flipside is trying to manage developers who don’t work for your company, and giving up control over endpoints and user experience. Additionally, you need to control access and features through tokens and keys. 80% of your API gateway effort will focus on what developers need to leverage your service, but the most difficult 20% will be managing developers’ experience and exposing services, which requires attention on ease of use and hiding complexity from developers. API gateways are for extending features to developers, so most of our examples are from the development perspective. Our outline follows the path developers will take to use your APIs. We will start from ground zero, as developers register themselves to use your service, considering how you will provision developer access. Per the outline in our introduction we will then move into other areas of development tools, key management, and other critical areas of API security. On our journey we will straddle two realms: buyers and builders. For builders, we will show you examples of features you need to build into your platform. For those of you looking to acquire an API gateway, consider this a mirror image of your critical platform criteria and where you will need services to get your deployment over the finish line. Provisioning As simple as it may seem, provisioning for API gateways is a balancing act. On the one hand companies want simple streamlined access for developers to build functionality. On the other hand they want to ensure this all complies with security policies. How can you ensure security while providing developers with full access? What process will ensure the right mix of policy checkpoints without hampering developers? Therein lies the rub. Let’s look at a developer’s first step: getting access to the development environment. Developer access provisioning Perhaps you have heard that developers can be a tad mercurial? Development is about building and enabling, so security controls which restrict usage or limit functions are seen as an impediment and source of friction. Keeping developers on board with security policy is a challenge, especially when any number of them don’t even work for your company. Development tools are typically selected for ease of use, so streamlining access to tools and simplifying access to API functionality is critical. API gateways proxy communications to applications – they act as traffic cops to direct application requests according to policy. That middle ground is a vital place for security to focus for three reasons: It is a boundary between internal and external, making it an ideal place for policy enforcement. It is a logical place to monitor inbound and outbound access. It is where developers get everything they need to create applications. What do developers need to get started coding? They need to be vetted to the API, which means they need to get credentials. These credentials come as tokens and possibly certificates. API gateways should provide what developers need to find and bind to your API to begin coding. First, developers generally need to register with the gateway to initiate the key issuance process and get credentials to your API. This may require a few minutes for a simple automated process, or much longer for requests which require manual review. Once accepted, developers receive credentials – often only to a development and testing instance, with production access to follow. How this process works, and how simple it is to implement, are important factors for selecting an API gateway. How well can your candidates be tuned to your organizational needs? When building an API gateway, be realistic about what developers will tolerate in terms of delay and complexity. Grand processes with many steps tend to stop developers in their tracks. The API documentation is another major factor in simplifying developers’ lives. The favorite words of many developers are “for example”, typically followed by a code snippet and a usage explanation. The goal is to get developers up and running quickly so look for code samples, reference implementation, and test clients when you evaluate API gateways. A wide variety of languages are in play, so over time you will likely your own miniature

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