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The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is a nonprofit foundation that works to improve the security of software. Through community-led open source software projects, hundreds of local chapters worldwide, tens of thousands of members, and leading educational and training conferences, the OWASP Foundation is the source for developers and technologists to secure the web.

The OWASP API Security Top 10 is a standard awareness document for developers and web application security. It represents a broad consensus about the most critical security risks associated with API's.

Businesses are encouraged to adopt this document and start ensuring that their applications minimize these top 10 risks.

Using the OWASP API Security Top 10 guidance is perhaps the most effective first step towards changing the software development culture within your organization into one that produces more secure code.

The document is comprised of 10 of the most prevalent concerns

Broken Object Level Authorisation
APIs tend to expose endpoints that handle object identifiers, creating a wide attack surface Level Access Control issue. Object-level authorization checks should be considered in every function that accesses a data source using input from the user.

Broken User Authentication
Authentication mechanisms are often implemented incorrectly, allowing attackers to compromise authentication tokens or to exploit implementation flaws to assume other user's identities temporarily or permanently. Compromising system's ability to identify the client/user compromises API security overall.

Excessive Data Exposure
Looking forward to generic implementations, developers tend to expose all object properties without considering their individual sensitivity, relying on clients to perform the data filtering before displaying it to the user.

Lack of Resources & Rate Limiting
Quite often, APIs do not impose any restrictions on the size or number of resources that can be requested by the client/user. Not only can this impact the API server performance, leading to Denial of Service (DoS), but also leaves the door open to authentication flaws such as brute force.

Broken Function Level Authorization
Complex access control policies with different hierarchies, groups, and roles, and an unclear separation between administrative and regular functions, tend to lead to authorization flaws. By exploiting these issues, attackers gain access to other users' resources and/or administrative functions.

Mass Assignment
The binding client provided data (e.g., JSON) to data models, without proper properties filtering based on a whitelist, usually lead to Mass Assignment. Either guessing objects properties, exploring other API endpoints, reading the documentation, or providing additional object properties in request payloads, allows attackers to modify object properties they are not supposed to.

Security Misconfiguration
Security misconfiguration is commonly a result of insecure default configurations, incomplete or ad-hoc configurations, open cloud storage, misconfigured HTTP headers, unnecessary HTTP methods, permissive Cross-Origin resource sharing (CORS), and verbose error messages containing sensitive information.

Injection
Injection flaws, such as SQL, NoSQL, Command Injection, etc., occur when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query. The attacker's malicious data can trick the interpreter into executing unintended commands or accessing data without proper authorization.

Improper Assets Management
APIs tend to expose more endpoints than traditional web applications, making proper and updated documentation highly important. Proper hosts and deployed API versions inventory also play an important role to mitigate issues such as deprecated API versions and exposed debug endpoints.

Insufficient Logging & Monitoring
Insufficient logging and monitoring, coupled with missing or ineffective integration with incident response, allows attackers to further attack systems, maintain persistence, pivot to more systems to tamper with, extract, or destroy data. Most breach studies demonstrate the time to detect a breach is over 200 days, typically detected by external parties rather than internal processes or monitoring.

Assessment costs are priced based on the size of the particular API, to gain an understanding of the size of the engagement we can use parameters such as how many endpoints the API has and how many methods each endpoint has.

Our experienced consultants are then able to calculate the number of man-days it would take to complete the assessment and collate the findings into a concise simple report. Covering at very least the OWASP API Security Top 10.

The statement of works would be compiled describing the total man-days required to fulfil the engagement, priced per man day.