Enhancing Security in Azure API Management with Azure Security Baseline 💥

Introduction

With the digital transformation still on the rise, APIs have become the backbone of modern applications that connect an enormous number of services and varied data sources. However, vulnerabilities in APIs create serious security risks for organizations. Azure API Management is an extremely secure and scalable platform for hosting, managing, and protecting APIs. Setting security baselines ensures that an organization is on the right foot concerning security for its API ecosystem by setting standards according to industrial standards. 

In this blog, we will be explaining the Azure Security Baseline for API Management, best practices, and recommended configuration.

Network Security:

Network Segmentation: Azure API Management should be deployed within a secured network boundary to minimize exposure to the public internet. Consider placing API Management in a private network with a VNET configuration, private endpoint for controlled access.

Firewall Protection: Azure Firewall or WAF in API Management must be used for all incoming and outbound traffic. Limit exposure of the public IP wherever possible and utilize network security groups for access policies at the subnet level.

IPWhitelist: It reduces vulnerability to outside attacks by allowing traffic from specific, trusted IP addresses. It can be implemented and enforced through configuration in NSGs or API Management itself with its built-in settings that restrict IP access.

Identity and Access Management

Role-Based Access Control: Azure API Management supports RBAC. It provides a facility for the administrator to set up permissions at a very granular level, based on user roles. Apply a minimum set of permissions for each group of users in keeping with the principle of least privilege.
Identify protection with Entra ID: Provide secure authentication and SSO using API Management with Entra ID. This also provides consistency of identity management within the Azure ecosystem to manage credentials and MFA centrally.

Client Certificates: Implement authentication of client certificates to validate the caller identity beyond just username/password and introduce another layer of security in API calls.

Data Protection

Transport Layer Security: Data in transit should be encrypted at least with TLS 1.2. API Management provides different settings for enforcing TLS, right from making sure API consumers interact with only secure endpoints.

Encryption of Data at Rest: Ensure that data is encrypted at rest within the API Management services with logs. In any case, Azure will have the encryption of data automatically, but additional encryption keys can be configured to put an extra layer of protection on it.

Token-Based Authentication: API Management offers a second layer of security because it grants support for OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, and JSON Web Tokens (JWT), ensuring proper API-level access control to let only authenticated and authorized users have access to sensitive information.

Defender for API & Threat Protection

Rate Limiting and Quotas: The most important feature of API Management is control over Rate Limiting and Quotas. Applying rate limiting will help prevent abuse, and it will also shield APIs from DDoS attacks. Through API Management, administrators are able to configure throttling requests so that only a specified number of requests per user are allowed to pass through, in order to maintain service stability.

Web Application Firewall Protection: WAF policies should be implemented to inspect and filter malicious requests. Azure WAF can be configured to detect SQL injection, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), and other OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, shielding APIs from common attack vectors.

Request Validation Policies: This provides strict request validation policies toward incoming requests, which means your backend systems get only valid requests. This includes but is not limited to enforcing validations for XML schema and JSON schema. In this way, your APIs are secured from any unexpected data.

Azure Defender for APIs adds an extra layer through which API traffic is continuously monitored for detecting and blocking malicious activities. Some benefits of using Defender for APIs are:

Real-time Threat Detection: Defender for APIs has several out-of-the-box policies that detect those threats such as injections, data exfiltration attempts, among others.

Anomaly Detection: It applies machine learning to find the API traffic pattern anomalies that are indicative of credential abuse, abuse of APIs, or of impending data breaches. 

Native Integration with Microsoft Sentinel: This makes Defender for APIs integrate in a manner that offers complete threat visibility with Microsoft Sentinel, enabling automated incident response.

Log and Monitor

Audit Logs: This provides the ability to audit log access and changes to APIs. API Management activity logs are available in both Azure Monitor and Azure Security Center, giving insight into operations that may indicate unusual activity.

Application Insights Integration: Leverage Azure Application Insights to trace the performance metrics of APIs, such as request rates, response times, and error rates. Events such as these will resolve security problems or serve to provide active insight into troubleshooting and optimization.

Alerts and Incident Response: This setup will provide alerts through Azure Monitor if there is unusual activity or any deviation from normal performance. This will integrate with Security Center and will further enhance the threat detection and incident response for API services.

Compliance and Governance

Azure Policy Enforcement: States API Management policies that align with some of the key industry standards, including but not limited to GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS. By using Azure Policy, you are able to automate compliance monitoring through policy enforcement across your environment.

Azure Resource Locking: Enable resource locking, provided by Azure, on your critical API Management resources. This will prevent accidental deletions or modifications and allow only authorized changes.

Data Residency and Sovereignty: The region-specific deployment of APIs can be made; log data storage location can be identified/defined by mentioning data residency regulations on the basis of which it is stored geographically.