Cloudflare API Gateway Demo and Walkthrough - Secure and protect your APIs

Summary

In this video, Umair Ahmed, Technical Marketing Director at Cloudflare, provides a detailed walkthrough of Cloudflare's API Gateway. He covers its benefits, including API visibility, security, and monitoring features such as performance analytics, rate limiting, and sensitive data detection. Umair demonstrates how the API Gateway helps secure and manage API traffic, using tools like mTLS, schema validation, and machine learning-driven abuse protection. The demo showcases how to configure API discovery, manage endpoints, and apply security rules to prevent unauthorized access and data loss, making it an essential tool for API security and monitoring.

Takeaways

• 😀 API traffic has grown rapidly in recent years, becoming the majority of traffic over Cloudflare's Global Network, making API security, management, and monitoring crucial.
• 😀 Cloudflare API Gateway offers API endpoint security, management, and monitoring, focusing on visibility, anomaly detection, and performance analytics.
• 😀 API Gateway provides detailed analytics such as request volume, error rate, latency, response size, and percentiles (p50, p90, p99) to improve API management.
• 😀 The positive security model in Cloudflare API Gateway is enforced through mutual TLS (mtls) and schema validation to protect APIs from malicious activities.
• 😀 Cloudflare API Gateway uses machine learning and rate limiting to prevent API abuse and control excessive traffic by setting recommended thresholds.
• 😀 Sensitive data detection is integrated into the API Gateway, analyzing requests for sensitive patterns (e.g., credit card numbers), providing visibility and alerts for potential data loss.
• 😀 The user workflow involves configuring API discovery, reviewing discovered APIs and data, enabling security measures like rate limiting, and continuously managing API endpoints.
• 😀 Endpoint management enables the export of API schemas that can be used for schema validation and integration with other tools or security models.
• 😀 Cloudflare API Gateway allows for filtering and detailed reporting on API traffic, with the ability to detect anomalies and take action based on specific data points.
• 😀 Rate limiting can be customized to block abusive or excessive API traffic, and recommendations for thresholds are based on observed traffic data to optimize security.

Q & A

What is the primary purpose of Cloudflare API Gateway?

Cloudflare API Gateway provides security, management, and monitoring for API endpoints, helping to protect API traffic, ensure visibility, and detect potential issues such as abuse or sensitive data leaks.

How does Cloudflare API Gateway help in securing API traffic?

It secures API traffic by enforcing a positive security model through mutual TLS (mTLS), schema validation, and by applying abuse protection using machine learning and rate limiting.

What is API Discovery, and why is it important?

API Discovery is the process of identifying API traffic to gain visibility into the exposed endpoints. It's important because it helps detect all APIs in use, even those that may not have been intentionally exposed, such as Shadow APIs.

What kind of analytics does Cloudflare API Gateway provide?

Cloudflare API Gateway provides detailed API analytics including performance metrics (like P50, P90, P99 percentiles), error rates, latency, response size, and anomaly detection alerts.

What is the significance of schema validation in API Gateway?

Schema validation ensures that API requests adhere to predefined formats, blocking requests that do not match the schema. This is a crucial part of enforcing a positive security model, reducing the risk of unauthorized or malformed requests.

What is the role of machine learning in API abuse protection?

Machine learning helps detect abnormal patterns in API traffic and suggests rate limiting thresholds. This allows for better protection against abuse by identifying excessive or malicious traffic.

How does Cloudflare API Gateway handle sensitive data detection?

Cloudflare API Gateway detects sensitive data in API requests, such as credit card numbers, and provides visibility if any such data is being transmitted. It continuously updates its detection rules to improve accuracy.

What is the process of adding a new API endpoint to Cloudflare API Gateway?

A new API endpoint can be added either automatically via discovery or manually by entering the endpoint details. Once added, Cloudflare collects performance and error metrics for that endpoint.

How does Cloudflare help prevent API abuse through rate limiting?

Cloudflare API Gateway offers customizable rate limiting rules that can be applied to specific API endpoints based on attributes such as headers, API keys, or query parameters. It also provides machine learning-driven recommendations for rate limits.

What happens when an API request is blocked due to mTLS or schema validation?

When an API request is blocked, detailed analytics are provided, including the reasons for blocking, such as the absence of a valid client certificate in the case of mTLS or schema violations.