Security Guidelines for Providing and Consuming APIs

This publication was produced through the efforts of chapters and volunteers but the content development falls outside of the CSA Research Lifecycle. For any questions and feedback, contact [email protected].

In modern application workloads, organizations are often required to integrate their application with other parties such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers, customers applications, and business partners. These integrations may vary from granting one-time read access to ongoing static data consumption, to exposure of APIs or application components to a 3rd party provider. 

The purpose of this document is to provide a framework for securely connecting external entities such as customers or third parties. The document provides a usable list of security considerations in order to estimate the risk involved with the specific connectivity (first part of the document) and a technical checklist for the implementation of security controls (second part of the document).