psilva's prophecies: api

Showing posts with label api. Show all posts

Thursday, March 4, 2021

Key Trends from F5 State of Application Strategy Report

Get your copy: www.f5.com/stateofappstrategy

We all know how much the world has changed in the last year. And, the results of the most recent #F5 State of Application Strategy survey make it clear, the pandemic has vastly accelerated a global digital transformation that was already underway. Progress that might normally have taken a decade has leapt forward in a single year—with respondents maturing in their journeys toward digital expansion. So let’s start the clock and take a look at the astonishing progress apparent through several key markers revealed in our seventh annual survey. #SOAS

Saturday, December 14, 2019

90 Seconds of Security: Breach Trends for 2019

F5 Labs Threat Intelligence team (f5labs.com) recently published their 2nd annual Application Protection Report and we take a look at some of the highlights. We cover PHP vulnerabilities, Formjacking, magecart attacks, and the relationship between breach causes and industry sectors. Get your copy at F5Labs.com

Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Protecting API Access with BIG-IP using OAuth

As more organizations use APIs in their systems, they've become targets for the not-so-good-doers so API Security is something you need to take seriously. Most APIs today use the HTTP protocol so organizations should protect them as they would ordinary web properties.

Starting in v13, BIG-IP APM is able to act as an OAuth Client, OAuth Resource Server and OAuth Authorization Server. In this example, we will show how to use BIG-IP APM to act as an OAuth Resource Server protecting the API.

In our environment, we’ve published an API (api.f5se.com) and we’re trying to get a list of departments in the HR database. The API is not natively protected and we want APM to enable OAuth protection to this API.

First, let’s try an unauthenticated request.

You can see we get the 401 Unauthorized response which is coming from the BIG-IP. In this instance we’re only sending 3 headers, Connection (close), Content Length (0) and WWW Authenticate (Bearer), indicating to the client that it wants Bearer Token authentication.

So we’ll get that authorization and a new access token.

Here the Getpostman.com (Postman toolchain for API developers) is preconfigured to get a new access token from the OAuth authorization server, which is a BIG-IP.

We will request the OAuth token and will need to authenticate to the BIG-IP.

After that, we get an authorization request. In this case, BIG-IP is acting as an Authorization server and is indicating to the resource owner (us) that there is a HR API application that wants to use certain information (about us) that the authorization server is going to provide.

In this case, it is telling us that the resource server wants to get scope api-email.

We’ll click Authorize and now we have our auth token and is saved in the Postman client.

Within the token properties we see that it expires in 300 seconds, it is a Bearer token and the scope is api-email and we get a refresh token as well.

Now we can add this token to the header and try to make a request again. And this time, we get a much better response.

We get a 200 OK, along with the headers of the application server. We’ll click on the Body tab within Postman, we’ll see the XML that the API has returned in response to the query for the list of departments that are available. There were no cookies being returned by the server if you were wondering about that tab. In the Headers tab we see the Authorization header that was being sent and the content of the Bearer token.

A simple way to easily protect your APIs leveraging OAuth 2.0 Resource Server capabilities in BIG-IP.

Special thanks to Michael Koyfman for the basis of the content and check out his full demo here.

ps

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Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Control It All with iControl

The concept of Application programming interfaces (APIs) has been around for a while.
According to CSC Distinguished Engineer & Chief Product Architect (and bass player) Martin Bartlett,

'The concept of an API pre-dates even the advent of personal computing, let alone the Web, by a very long time! The principal of a well-documented set of publicly addressable "entry points" that allow an application to interact with another system has been an essential part of software development since the earliest days of utility data processing. However, the advent of distributed systems, and then the web itself, has seen the importance and utility of these same basic concepts increased dramatically.’ (Courtesy: http://history.apievangelist.com/)

An API is a set of routine definitions, protocols, and tools for building software and applications. It is software written to function as a communication bridge between Web applications. That’s how iControl started according to Joe Pruitt – as a way for the early versions of BIG-IP LTM (BIG-IP) and BIG-IP DNS (3-DNS/GTM) to communicate with each other to ensure they were making the right traffic management decisions. And this was 16 years ago!

Today, APIs are all over place running behind the curtains without any direct user interaction. They are primarily used for computer consumption and typically absorbed by web applications. APIs make services available for developers to build those same services into their applications. eBay, Amazon & AWS, Facebook, Twitter and Google Maps are some examples you might be familiar with. For instance, Google Maps has an API so developers can use the back-end services to create their own ‘maps.’ Maybe it is a map of restaurants in the vicinity of a hotel. The hotel website could use the Google maps API to show different shopping, eating or recreational activities in the area. They wouldn’t need to develop the maps nor house the data themselves.

With the Internet of Things (IoT), APIs allow you to share, manage, access and interact with your previously unconnected items like cameras, bicycles and even medicine bottles. And there are many IoT APIs that are available.

And that’s really the point with iControl.

Whether you’re looking to tweak a feature or spin up 500 new pool members, iControl can do it. Anything you can do via the command line or GUI, you can accomplish via iControl. And, you can do it programmatically so you don’t have to enter in every single command in the chain, or wake up someone at 3am during the change control window just to bleed the servers off a pool.

iControl is F5’s open, web services-based API that allows complete, dynamic, and programmatic control of control over nearly every aspect of both execution and configuration on BIG-IP systems. With iControl you can work like a wizard—add, modify, or configure your F5 device in real time. It is the primary means through which BIG-IP is integrated into both commercial management offerings and cloud computing environments. In short, iControl is a simple, light weight API that allows you programmatic access via Traffic Management Shell (tmsh) commands.

And now you can say, 'I control my infrastructure with iControl.'

ps

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Wednesday, February 26, 2014

RSA 2014: API Integration (feat Marshall)

With software defining everything these days, Corey Marshall, F5 Security Solution Architect, discusses F5 API’s and how they integrate with other technology solutions. He talks about iCall, iRules, iControl and iApps and where each is applicable. BIG-IP Programmability.