API Management as a Central Security Hub

The myth of the silver bullet

The conventional wisdom that API security can be solved with a single tool or approach isn't just misguided — it's dangerous. This mindset has led many organizations down a path of false security, believing that deploying a WAF or implementing authentication provides adequate protection. The reality is far more complex.

API security is fundamentally a multifaceted challenge that demands a comprehensive, defense-in-depth strategy. Like securing a fortress, protecting APIs requires multiple layers of defense, each addressing different attack vectors and vulnerability windows throughout the API lifecycle.

Effective API security must span the entire development and operational continuum, from initial design concepts to production runtime environments.

The API management foundation

A recent post by IAM expert and former Gartner analyst Felix Gaehtgens highlights the tools, technologies, and frameworks that exist to tackle the hard problem of identity and security. The API management platform can serve as a central hub for bringing together a variety of these tools & technologies to offer comprehensive security throughout the lifecycle of APIs.

Let’s examine these various technologies and frameworks, what they mitigate, and what tools an API management platform such as Kong offers.

Access control and identity management

Access control is a core concept in security that involves identification, authentication, and authorization, ensuring that access aligns with policies and roles. Modern access control systems often incorporate advanced technologies like multi-factor authentication, biometric verification, and dynamic policy-based frameworks to enhance security and streamline access management. Furthermore, Zero Trust architecture, which assumes no user or device is inherently trusted, is increasingly adopted, requiring continuous verification and authorization for access.

Authentication and authorization frameworks

Through its plugin architecture, Kong offers multiple authentication and authorization frameworks to help customers adopt a security strategy that meets their needs. By integrating authentication and authorization frameworks with both in-house and third-party Identity Providers (IdPs), the Kong API platform enables organizations to create secure, efficient, and compliant environments that safeguard sensitive information and support business growth.

Out-of-the-box authentication plugins available in Kong:

• OAuth 2.0 - Industry-standard authorization framework for third-party access
• OpenID Connect (OIDC) - Identity layer built on OAuth 2.0 that extends other plugins such as JWT, ACL, and OAuth 2.0 OpenID Connect - Plugin | Kong Docs
• MTLS Authentication - Secures client and service communication via certificates
• JWT (JSON Web Token) - Token-based authentication for stateless authorization
• Key Authentication - API key-based authentication for simple access control
• LDAP Authentication - Enterprise directory service integration
• HMAC Authentication - Helps ensure the integrity of requests via shared secrets and signatures
• Basic Authentication - Traditional username/password authentication

Kong supports sophisticated authorization frameworks as listed below to enforce consistent, fine-grained access control:

• OPA
• AuthZen (community plugin)
• RBAC via scopes and claims
• Consumers & ACL (Kong’s own)

Kong offers a wide variety of Identity Provider Integrations

• OIDC & OAuth compliant IdPs (Full list here)
• SAML Providers
• Kong Identity (in-house IdP)

Authentication and authorization are the first line of defense against unauthorized access, effectively limiting potential damage during breaches.

OAuth security extensions

OAuth security extensions offer mechanisms to enhance the security of the already well-established authorization flows. Kong offers support for the following extensions:

• Proof of Key Exchange (PKCE) for preventing CSRF and authorization code injection attacks
• Demonstration of Proof of Possession (DPoP) to safeguard api access against stolen tokens
  • mTLS-based proof of possession
  • Application layer DPoP
• JWT secured authZ requests(JAR) & JWT secured authZ response(JARM) protect against tampering and man-in-the-middle type of attacks
• Pushed Authorization Request (PAR) prevents client impersonation, thus protecting API access

These capabilities in Kong offer protection against advanced attacks, thus protecting your APIs and data.

Secure credential management

In modern IT environments, integration with secret managers is crucial for robust security and operational efficiency. Instead of hardcoding secrets, which is a common security risk, modern architectures demand the retrieval of secrets from secure storage solutions on an as-needed basis.

A key strength of the Kong API platform is its ability to integrate secrets management tools like HashiCorp Vault or Azure Key Vault and securely fetch credentials at runtime. This prevents sensitive information from being exposed in code or configuration files. Furthermore, the platform can use Kubernetes Secrets and service accounts to securely manage credentials within containerized environments.

Kong offers support for a comprehensive list of Secrets Manager tools:

• Hashicorp Vaults
• Cyberark Conjur
• AWS Secrets Manager
• Azure Key Vault
• GCP Secrets Manager
• Konnect Vault/Config Store (Kong’s native)

Centralized policy enforcement

Implementing security measures independently for each API or service often leads to inconsistencies and vulnerabilities. Centralizing policy management streamlines administration and provides unified visibility. API platforms act as a central governance point, allowing organizations to apply and manage a consistent security posture across their entire API ecosystem.

Via its plugin architecture, the Kong API platform offers robust policies to enforce security on every request, ensuring that all traffic is authenticated, authorized, and validated before it reaches the backend services.

Let’s examine the different classes of security policies.

Policies to prevent API abuse

API abuse refers to malicious or unintended use of APIs that deviates from the intended
purpose or acceptable usage patterns. This can involve a range of activities, including
excessive data extraction, unauthorized access, injecting malicious code, or disrupting services.

Kong has a few policies in its chest to mitigate some of these attack vectors:

• Rate limit: Protects backend services and ensures services are up and available to legitimate users by enforcing limits of API requests based on a number of factors
• Request size limit: Protects APIs from being overwhelmed by blocking incoming requests above the specified size
• Response rate limit: Prevents misuse by ensuring that the API clients are honoring the API service quotas
• CORS: Ensures controlled access to resources, preventing malicious or unauthorized usage
• IP Restriction: Helps create allow/deny lists, thus blocking malicious access
• Injection Protection: Detects and blocks known injection patterns from being embedded in API requests
• JSON/XML Threat Protection: Ensures API payload adheres to the set limits, effectively blocking attacks where excessively large payloads are used to overwhelm the APIs.
• OAS validation: Validates HTTP requests and responses against OpenAPI specification
• Request termination: Terminates requests to prevent abuse with a catch-all route that does not match any routing criteria

Policies to mitigate misconfigurations and excessive exposure

Misconfigurations can lead to unintended exposures.
Example: The team intended to expose just the `GET` method, but instead exposed the endpoint broadly.

Kong has a few tools to mitigate the misconfigurations and excessive exposures:

• Kong’s Route construct offers powerful route matching criteria. Requests matching the criteria are allowed to proceed while dropping others thus protecting the backend. Routes can be matched based on the following:
  • Protocols
  • Hosts
  • Methods
  • Headers
  • ports
  • SNI
• Response transformer plugin allows API responses to be modified before sending it to clients. It can replace or remove sensitive contents, thus preventing data leaks
• Response Size limiting plugin blocks response bodies greater than the specified size, thus protecting from unintended data leaking should an API backend misbehave

Observability and analytics

Observability is critical to security because it provides the deep, real-time insights needed to detect, investigate, and prevent threats. Observability acts as a surveillance system, giving a full, contextual view of what's happening across the entire system. It relies on four types of telemetry: logs, metrics, traces, and events.

API platforms have a unique vantage point (particularly the API gateway component) to collect comprehensive and consistent data on every single API transaction. This is crucial for building a complete picture of the API ecosystem's health, performance, and security.

Kong’s API platform offers a number of observability and debuggability tools to monitor performance, identify bottlenecks, and set up alerts for potential issues before they become critical.

• Observability plugins:
  • OTel: Reports open-telemetry compatible metrics, traces/spans, and logs to an OTel-compatible server
  • Prometheus: Exports Prometheus exposition format metrics to a Prometheus server
  • StatsD: Exports metrics to StatsD server
  • Log plugins: That log API requests and response data
• Debugger captures detailed component-level telemetry data and comprehensive logging information. This targeted approach to observability enables teams to gain a deeper understanding of their services' performance, dependencies, error conditions, and potential bottlenecks, eventually reducing the MTTR
• Advanced Analytics provides real-time in-depth insights into API health, performance, and usage. It helps businesses optimize their API strategies and improve operational efficiency.
• Audit logs: Logs all activities. It helps detect and respond to potential security incidents

Observability strengthens and enhances API security.

The big picture

By bringing together these diverse technologies, API platforms offer a comprehensive security solution that is more than the sum of its parts. They provide a unified control plane for managing identities, credentials, policies, communication security, and observability.

This approach simplifies security for developers, automates policy enforcement for administrators, and provides a clear, auditable trail of all access and activity. The result is a more resilient, scalable, and secure API ecosystem that can adapt to the evolving threat landscape without compromising agility or development speed.