Securing the REST APIs

Building microservices means exposing the entire application to the worldwide web. For every request-response transaction, the client accesses the endpoint of the API publicly, which poses potential risks to the application. Unlike web-based applications, API services have weak mechanisms to manage user access using login controls. Thus, this chapter will provide several ways to protect the API services created using the FastAPI framework.

There is no such thing as perfect security. The main goal is to establish policies and solutions related to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of these services. The confidentiality policy requires tokens, encryption and decryption, and certificates as mechanisms to make some APIs private. On the other hand, the integrity policy involves maintaining the data exchange as authentic, accurate, and reliable by using a "state" and hashed codes during the authentication and authorization process. The availability...