API Security Weekly: Issue #16

This week, US Department of Homeland Security issued an emergency directive to have DNS secured and Go had another CPU DoS vulnerability fix, plus we share recaps and recordings from a couple API security conference talks.

Vulnerabilities

Another CPU DoS vulnerability in Go TLS (CVE-2019-6486) got fixed. This vulnerability impacts APIs implemented as Go microservices. The vulnerability enables attackers to exploit:

• TLS handshakes
• X.509 certificates
• JWT tokens
• ECDH shares
• ECDSA signatures. 

To fix the vulnerability, upgrade to Go versions 1.11.5 or 1.10.8.

Best Practices

DNS infrastructure is critical for web and API security. To prevent DNS hijacking, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued their first ever Emergency Directive 19-01: 

1. Verify DNS records. 
2. Update DNS account passwords.
3. Add multi-factor authentication.
4. Monitor certificate transparency logs.

Conference Talks

The API Days conference has published a video of Isabelle Mauny's "Five API Security Rules" talk:

1. Know your APIs and their risks. 
2. Validate and sanitize inputs. 
3. Validate JWT tokens. 
4. Implement fine-grained authorization. 
5. Automate security. 

Analysts

Mark O’Neill from Gartner gave a talk at the recent Qualys Security Conference. The recording itself is only available to registered attendees, but there is also written a recap: "API Security: Enabling Innovation Without Enabling Attacks and Data Breaches."   

Subscribe to this weekly newsletter at https://APISecurity.io.