Cequence API Sentinel: Discovering and analyzing all org’s APIs to detect and mitigate security risks

Cequence Security announced the general availability of Cequence API Sentinel, a runtime API security solution that delivers continuous run-time API visibility, shadow API discovery, risk analysis, and conformance assessment.

With the addition of API Sentinel, Cequence delivers the industry’s only multi-threat API security solution that unifies visibility, vulnerability protection, bot mitigation, and business logic abuse prevention into a single platform.

“API security is the fastest growing segment of the security market today, but has been largely underserved by siloed point products that only address a part of problem.

“The addition of API Sentinel to the Cequence Application Security Platform extends our API protection beyond automated bot attacks and API abuse to include discovery of API risks introduced by shadow publication, coding or non-conformance errors,” said Ameya Talwalkar, co-founder and chief product officer of Cequence Security.

“Our end-to-end approach ensures that API security can be clearly understood and actioned across development, security, operations, and compliance teams.”

By integrating rapidly with existing API management tools like gateways and proxies, API Sentinel provides insights into the usage of each API needed to mitigate security vulnerabilities. Key capabilities include:

• Continuous risk scoring: Assesses and assigns a numeric risk factor for each API based on strength of authentication used, presence of PII, PCI or other sensitive data, detection of unencrypted communication, and non-conformance to the OpenAPI specification.
• Runtime API catalog and usage analysis: Automatically discovers all APIs, including managed and shadow APIs. Analyzes API usage and access, including geo-location, IP addresses and organizations. Provides a view into headers, parameters, and response codes with flexible time-based filtering.
• Schema non-conformance detection: Performs a runtime comparison of your inventoried APIs against an OpenAPI specification to uncover and flag API endpoints, headers, parameters and response codes as non-conformant. Discovered out-of-spec elements can be addressed by development, effectively mitigating security risks before they reach production.

Built to help organizations understand the risk posture of all their APIs so they can avoid costly data loss, fraud, and API abuse, API Sentinel answers critical questions that most organizations can’t answer, including:

• What are all the published APIs –sanctioned and shadow? How are they used across each team, department, product line, geography?
• What is our overall API risk exposure? Do we have API vulnerabilities that are being leveraged by attackers?
• Are APIs exposing sensitive data or PII which could put us out of compliance?

“Organizations typically spend more time focused on active attacks and breaches than they do assessing their code and environments for vulnerabilities and security gaps which are often hiding in plain sight. In most cases, they simply lack tools that can provide that level of visibility for APIs,” said Ed Amoroso, chief executive officer of TAG Cyber.

“API Sentinel fills a critical need so that security and development can collaborate to secure and protect today’s API-driven applications.”

“The Cequence team is committed to helping us enhance API security to protect our environments from potential bad actors,” said Ram Ravichadran, CTO of Narvar. “They helped bolster and protect our API security from all forms of risk. As a platform designed to drive long-term customer loyalty, we appreciate their dedication to help further protect the brands we serve.”

API Sentinel joins the industry leading, ML-based Cequence Bot Defense and Cequence App Firewall in the Application Security Platform that are currently protecting APIs and web apps with a near zero-impact on the development workflow, allowing development teams to maintain or even increase productivity.

Available as a modern Kubernetes application, API Sentinel integrates natively with popular API Gateways, like Amazon API Gateway, Apigee and MuleSoft, and proxies like NGINX, HAProxy, and Envoy.