👁 hacker

Exposing your data or application through a REST API is a wonderful way to reach a wide audience.

The downside of a wide audience, however, is that it’s not just the good guys who come looking.
 
 
 
 

Securing REST APIs

Security consists of three factors:

1. Confidentiality
2. Integrity
3. Availability

In terms of Microsoft’s STRIDE approach, the security compromises we want to avoid with each of these are Information Disclosure, Tampering, and Denial of Service. The remainder of this post will only focus on Confidentiality and Integrity.

In the context of an HTTP-based API, Information Disclosure is applicable for GET methods and any other methods that return information. Tampering is applicable for PUT, POST, and DELETE.

Threat Modeling REST APIs

A good way to think about security is by looking at all the data flows. That’s why threat modeling usually starts with a Data Flow Diagram (DFD). In the context of a REST API, a close approximation to the DFD is the state diagram. For proper access control, we need to secure all the transitions.

The traditional way to do that, is to specify restrictions at the level of URI and HTTP method. For instance, this is the approach that Spring Security takes. The problem with this approach, however, is that both the method and the URI are implementation choices.

👁 link-relation
URIs shouldn’t be known to anybody but the API designer/developer; the client will discover them through link relations.

Even the HTTP methods can be hidden until runtime with mature media types like Mason or Siren. This is great for decoupling the client and server, but now we have to specify our security constraints in terms of implementation details! This means only the developers can specify the access control policy.

That, of course, flies in the face of best security practices, where the access control policy is externalized from the code (so it can be reused across applications) and specified by a security officer rather than a developer. So how do we satisfy both requirements?

Authorizing REST APIs

I think the answer lies in the state diagram underlying the REST API. Remember, we want to authorize all transitions. Yes, a transition in an HTTP-based API is implemented using an HTTP method on a URI. But in REST, we shield the URI using a link relation. The link relation is very closely related to the type of action you want to perform.

The same link relation can be used from different states, so the link relation can’t be the whole answer. We also need the state, which is based on the representation returned by the REST server. This representation usually contains a set of properties and a set of links. We’ve got the links covered with the link relations, but we also need the properties.

👁 policy
In XACML terms, the link relation indicates the action to be performed, while the properties correspond to resource attributes.

Add to that the subject attributes obtained through the authentication process, and you have all the ingredients for making an XACML request!

There are two places where such access control checks comes into play. The first is obviously when receiving a request.

You should also check permissions on any links you want to put in the response. The links that the requester is not allowed to follow, should be omitted from the response, so that the client can faithfully present the next choices to the user.

Using XACML For Authorizing REST APIs

I think the above shows that REST and XACML are a natural fit.

All the more reason to check out XACML if you haven’t already, especially XACML’s REST Profile and the forthcoming JSON Profile.