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Noname vs Testing-only Solutions

Noname vs Testing-only Solutions

Harold Bell
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Testing for design flaws is a vital component of API security and can help your organization increase the amount of secure code it produces. Without adequate testing, your developer teams will be unable to catch vulnerabilities before they’re exploited. However, testing is not the only component of a complete API security strategy. Your organization still needs to be able to inventory and protect APIs in the wild. That includes analyzing runtime traffic and detecting anomalous behavior.

Industry solutions and 3rd party tools with API security testing features include: 42Crunch, API Clarity, APISec.ai, Astra, BurpSuite Professional, BLST Security, Data Theorem, httpie, Insomnia, Levo.ai, Overcast, Purpleteam, Qualys, SoapUI, Speedscale, and Stackhawk.

API Security Requirement

Testing-only Solutions

Noname Security

Full Observability
✔️
Accurate Inventory
✔️
Security Posture Management Analysis
✔️
API Specific Runtime Security Controls
✔️
API Security Testing
✔️ ✔️

Full Observability

Though API security testing is a vital pillar of your API security strategy, testing doesn’t provide visibility into your API estate. The reality is, without the proper API discovery tools, there is no telling how many APIs you have employed. And given the attrition of IT departments and developer teams, it is likely that your environment contains a number of shadow and zombie APIs. APIs that were essentially created by a pre-existing team and are running unattended in the wild. Additionally, observability also includes the health of your environment. Though testing can help uncover design flaws and misconfigurations, testing doesn’t help provide insights into your network activity, API behavior, or potential attacks. So testing solutions alone can leave you vulnerable when it comes to having full visibility into your API estate.

Accurate Inventory

As mentioned above, testing solutions alone do not provide insight into your API estate. Not only from a quantity perspective but also from the perspective of what your APIs are capable of. Having an accurate inventory entails having visibility into things like the types of data that traverse your APIs, configuration settings, routing information, traffic mapping, and other significant metadata. Testing solutions wouldn’t be able to provide any of this information.

Security Posture Management Analysis

Despite the fact that testing solutions can help you resolve design flaws, pentesting and other efforts on production environments can easily miss shadow APIs. Also, testing in development is usually not for security concerns specific to API security. So there isn’t consistent monitoring of the API estate. Noname Posture Management discovers all APIs and helps organizations proactively identify and resolve misconfigurations by continuously monitoring the environment.

API Specific Runtime Security Controls

When it comes to identifying and remediating attacks in real-time, API testing tools unfortunately also don’t provide any protection. They cannot scan your environment to establish baseline behaviors and detect anomalies and suspicious activity. When it comes to runtime protection, you need to consult a purpose-built solution to protect your API environment from real-time threats.

API Security Testing

Unsurprisingly, this is the one area where API security testing solutions excel. However, one key difference is that Noname Active Testing allows you to shift left and move testing earlier in the development lifecycle and for API-security-specific, business-logic-based attacks. By testing early and often, you are able to identify and stop vulnerabilities before production. 

Harold Bell

Harold Bell is the Director of Content Marketing at Noname Security. He has over a decade of experience in the IT industry with leading organizations such as Cisco, Nutanix, and Rubrik, and has been featured as an executive ghostwriter in Forbes Technology Council and Hacker News.

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