Unrestricted access to sensitive business flows is item 6 on the OWASP API Top 10. It refers to a significant security vulnerability where attackers exploit APIs to manipulate business logic, leading to unauthorized access to critical functions. This may result in unauthorized actions such as data exfiltration, market manipulation, or content scraping, compromising the integrity of business operations. Ensuring proper controls to enforce business flows in the correct order is essential to protect against these vulnerabilities.
What is unrestricted access to sensitive business flows?
Unrestricted access to this sensitive business flow is a critical security vulnerability that allows attackers to exploit the individual parts of the workflow outside of the expected workflow or business logic. Most applications, including APIs, have a workflow that users take through them. For instance, to buy an item from an eCommerce website, a user typically browses available products, adds products to their shopping cart, views the contents of their shopping cart, fills out their shipping information, completes the payment form, and submits the order. If these activities do not occur in the proper order and with the proper inputs and outputs from step to step, this could introduce errors in the business flow or its outcomes.
This can result in an attacker performing actions such as purchasing all available stock, reserving all seats on a flight, brute-force checking of credit card numbers, or artificially initiating a price reduction. In these instances, the API facilitates unexpected and unwanted business flows, commonly referred to as “API business logic abuse.” This unrestricted access can lead to unauthorized access to sensitive or restricted information, resulting in significant financial losses and reputational damage.
How unrestricted access to sensitive business flows happens.
The HTTP protocol, as originally defined, is designed to be a stateless protocol to retrieve documents. State and workflow in an API and web application are preserved through several mechanisms such as setting session or workflow-specific cookies, using hidden form fields, and setting specific paths for each step in the workflow. This requires more effort on the part of the API programmers to track each step and to ensure that the step receives the appropriate inputs from the previous step.
When API development teams build a workflow and implement it in an API, they often build inadequate means of enforcing that the business logic and its steps are enforced in the appropriate order and with the correct inputs and outputs. This allows attackers the ability to skip steps or insert their own inputs.
Unrestricted access to sensitive business flow examples.
Common examples of unrestricted access to sensitive business flows include:
- Inventory scalping and depletion: Attackers purchase all available stock of a high-demand product, leading to shortages and lost revenue. Inventory scalping is when the purchaser then sells the product through a secondary market, such as an online auction, at a much higher markup.
- Price manipulation: Exploiting pricing APIs to artificially inflate or deflate prices, impacting market dynamics and customer trust.
- Data exfiltration: Unauthorized access to sensitive information, such as customer data, financial records, or intellectual property.
- Denial of service: Overloading systems with excessive requests, disrupting operations, and harming customer experience.
- Brute-force enumeration and content scraping: By skipping steps with controls to verify that the API client is not an automated scraping bot, bots can enumerate or discover data inside the API and its backend storage.
How unrestricted access to sensitive business impacts your business.
Unrestricted access to sensitive business flows can lead to substantial financial repercussions, including loss of revenue and regulatory penalties. Furthermore, it can damage an organization’s reputation, erode customer trust, and create compliance issues if sensitive information is exposed or misused.
How to prevent unrestricted access to sensitive business.
Understanding the steps to the workflow and building mechanisms to enforce that flow is essential for protecting sensitive business logic. Implementing comprehensive API management practices will enable organizations to effectively monitor and secure their digital assets, protecting them from malicious actors.
To mitigate the risks associated with unrestricted access to sensitive business flows, organizations should implement robust API security measures, including:
- Business logic validation: Conducting threat modeling to identify potential vulnerabilities and risks associated with sensitive business flows.
- Monitoring and detection: Utilizing anomaly detection to identify unusual patterns and behavioral analytics to flag suspicious actions.
- Input validation: Ensuring all inputs are sanitized to prevent injection attacks.
- Rate limiting: Limiting the number of requests per unit of time to prevent abuse.
- Authentication and authorization: Employing strong mechanisms to verify user identity and permissions.
- Regular security assessments: Performing vulnerability scanning and penetration testing to assess the effectiveness of security measures.
Read the blog post How to Mitigate API Vulnerabilities for best practices.
Successful API deployments enforce business workflows.
Unrestricted access to sensitive business flows is one of the hidden vulnerabilities that development teams can introduce into their APIs. This vulnerability is avoided by having strong security reviews and by using tools designed to identify weaknesses in APIs. In today’s API-first world, companies that successfully manage the risk of business logic abuse are more successful at earning and protecting their revenue.
How Vercara can help.
Vercara’s UltraAPI product suite is a set of solutions purpose-built to protect APIs against unrestricted access to sensitive business flows and other attacks against APIs. It consists of three components:
UltraAPI Comply is a solution that sits in front of API servers to detect API schemas, data types, and security controls using machine learning to identify security and compliance vulnerabilities and their associated risks.
UltraAPI Bot Manager is an inline solution that sits in front of APIs to detect and block attacks against APIs and automated, unwanted bots that try to evade process workflows.
UltraAPI Discover scans APIs from the perspective of an attacker across the Internet to identify API endpoints, schema definitions, and security controls that protect them.
For more information or to ask us questions, please contact us.
