Zero Trust API Security

We implement layered API authentication: OAuth 2.0 with short-lived JWTs for user-facing APIs, mutual TLS for service-to-service APIs, and API keys with IP restrictions and rate limits for third-party integrations. Token validation happens at the API gateway and again at the application level — defense in depth. JWT validation checks signature, expiry, issuer, audience, and scope on every request.

The API gateway is the first line of defense. We configure: request validation (schema enforcement rejects malformed payloads before they hit your code), header sanitization (strip or validate forwarded headers), payload size limits, request rate limiting per client and per endpoint, geographic restrictions, and bot detection. Security policies are defined as code and deployed alongside your API definitions.

For high-security APIs, we implement request signing: clients sign requests with HMAC-SHA256 or RSA using a timestamp and request body. The server validates the signature and rejects replayed or tampered requests. This prevents man-in-the-middle modification even if TLS is somehow compromised. Signing is implemented as SDK middleware so client developers do not need to handle cryptography directly.

We configure real-time threat detection on API traffic: anomalous request patterns (credential stuffing, enumeration attacks, injection attempts), unusual client behavior (sudden traffic spikes from a single client), and authorization probing (repeated access attempts to resources the client does not own). Detected threats trigger automated responses: temporary blocks, rate limiting escalation, and security team notification.