BURSTAPI, short for Application Programming Interface, is a mechanism that helps extract data from software applications and transfer it to other software or users using APIs.
Communication through APIs is based on different requests and responses, and developers provide good documentation on structuring requests to get the desired response.
APIs allow many software/applications to automatically interact with each other and allow users to get the information they need without any input. This makes the process easier and faster.
Today, APIs are everywhere, like share buttons in games, blogs, and other applications. They help you easily share on Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.
How Are APIs Protected?
APIs can have many vulnerabilities related to broken authentication, rate limiting, code injection, DOS attacks, etc., which must be tested regularly, reported, and appropriately mitigated.
Regular testing is required to protect APIs from vulnerabilities like parameter tampering and command injection. Various open-source tools exist, such as Postman, Swagger, and JMeter.
A WAF can be deployed in front of API resources to protect core applications by validating and monitoring API traffic.
What Are The Types Of API Security?
Different APIs can be used to transfer and access data from other applications.
Open APIs: Open APIs, often called public APIs, are publicly available application programming interfaces that provide developers with program access to a proprietary software application or a web service. It helps developers reduce manpower and work more efficiently.
PARTNER APIs: PARTNER APIs, as the name suggests, help you partner with your integrated application to perform all the get requests. These APIs are not publicly available, and developers might need a license to access them.
INTERNAL APIs: INTERNAL APIs are called private APIs, as internal systems can only use them. Internal APIs are generally used within a company to help different departments work correctly together with the help of a standard API.
COMPOSITE APIs: COMPOSITE APIs are the composite result of combining different service and data APIs to perform other work synchronously.
WEB SERVICE APIs: WEB SERVICE APIs use URLs to provide their services by hitting different requests, such as a URL that gives the intended information as the user asks.
Web Service APIs are of 4 different types:
- SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol): An XML protocol defining message structure and communication methods.
- XML-RPC: A protocol that uses a specific XML format for data transfer.
- JSON-RPC: A similar protocol to XML-RPC, but it uses JSON format to transfer data instead of XML.
- REST (Representational State Transfer) is not a protocol but a set of architectural principles driven by data rather than function.
The most general solution to API application protection is to set up a WAF that monitors and filters requests to your application through APIs.
Several API attacks are primarily conducted on API endpoints, which require protection and can be given by constantly monitoring the endpoints for those attacks.
DOS & DDOS Attacks:
Many requests are made on the API, resulting in resource usage for each response. A poorly written API can use many resources in this attack.
To prevent DOS and DDOS attacks, you can implement techniques like rate limiting, malicious IP blocking, and profile-based solutions to block malicious requests.
MAN In The MIDDLE Attacks:
A nonsecure connection between a client and a server, with the help of APIs, can open up many vulnerable spots for attackers to attack. One is the man-in-the-middle attack, in which the attacker sits between the client and server connection and reads the unencrypted data transferred between the client and the server in JSON format.
Prevention from this is effortless. You have to implement a secure way of communication between the client and server (HTTPS-only traffic ).
API Parameter Tampering And DATA Exfiltration Attacks:
The request sent to the API can have different parameters that can be changed or manipulated to reverse engineer the API and cause a DOS or DDOS attack or extract data.
Data Exfiltration also includes brute forcing. Making such attacks is more straightforward as all the APIs are programmed to automate the process, making the process more accessible by using this functionality to their advantage.
Protection against this kind of attack is only with the help of WAF, which can profile different schemas of attacks and then filter and validate the requests accordingly.
Here Are Our Picks For The 10 Best API Protection Tools And Their Feature:
- Apigee: Comprehensive API management with security features like rate limiting, OAuth, and threat protection.
- Assertible: Automated API testing with continuous integration and deployment, ensuring API reliability and security.
- Karate: Open-source framework for API testing, supporting multiple protocols and robust assertion capabilities.
- AppKnox: An automated mobile app security testing platform that identifies vulnerabilities and compliance issues.
- Insomnia: User-friendly API client for testing and debugging RESTful APIs with authentication and environment variable support
- Rest-Assured: Java DSL for testing REST APIs, offering simple and readable syntax for comprehensive test coverage.
- Fiddler: Web debugging proxy tool for inspecting and modifying HTTP(S) traffic, aiding security analysis.
- SoapUI: Functional testing tool for SOAP and REST APIs, providing powerful test automation and security testing features.
- Salt Security: An AI-driven API security platform that detects and prevents real-time API attacks.
- ReadyAPI: Integrated platform for API testing, including functional, performance, security, and load testing for comprehensive coverage.
10 Best API Protection Tools in 2025
| API Protection Tools | Key Features | Stand Alone Feature | Pricing | Free trial / Demo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Apigee | 1. Link between the present user interface and the already stored database. 2. Automation of documentation and development of API. 3. Supports multi-cloud architecture. 4. Debug a proxy with the Trace too. 5. Can include reusable sets of functionality. | Comprehensive API management for design, security, and analytics. | Custom pricing available | Yes |
| 2. Assertible | 1. Encrypted Variables. 2. Smarter Notifications. 3. Manipulate variables using jq. 4. Automatically import OpenAPI v3 response json schema assertions. 5. Integrate with PagerDuty to supercharge your API monitoring. | Automated API testing with continuous integration support. | Starts at $25/month | Yes |
| 3. Karate | 1. Collaboration via git. 2. One-stop shop for API and UI. 3. Parallel execution. 4. Reuse as performance tests. 5. End-user workflows. | Open-source framework for API testing and performance. | Free, open-source | No |
| 4. AppKnox | 1. Accuracy. 2. Speed. 3. API capture during DAST. 4. API Scanner URL filter. 5. Reveals API. | Automated vulnerability detection for mobile app security. | Custom pricing available | Yes |
| 5. Insomnia | 1. Automation. 2. Load Testing. 3. Record HTTPS traffic. 4. Import SAZ files. 5. CI server integration. | User-friendly API client for designing and testing APIs. | Free, premium plans available | Yes |
| 6. Rest-Assured | 1. Functional testing. 2. CI/CD integration. 3. Inbuilt Java and Rest Assured libraries. 4. Integration with Maven. 5. Unit test frameworks – Junit, TestNG. | Java DSL for testing REST services easily. | Free, open-source | No |
| 7. Fiddler | 1. Automation 2. Scriptless Functional Testing 3. Drag and Drop Test Creation for Complex Scenarios 4. Security Testing 5. Load Testing | Web debugging proxy for capturing and inspecting HTTP(S) traffic. | Free, premium version available | Yes |
| 8. SoapUI | 1. Automation 2. Script less Functional Testing 3. Drag and Drop Test Creation for Complex Scenarios 4. Security Testing 5. Load Testing | Functional testing tool for SOAP and REST APIs. | Free, pro version available | Yes |
| 9. Salt Security | 1. Discover all the inventory API’s including shadow and Zombie 2. Prevent sensitive data exposure 3. Correlates activity to block the attackers before reconnaissance 4. Shift left practices with proactive API security 5. Accelerate incident response | AI-driven platform for real-time API attack prevention. | Custom pricing available | Yes |
| 10. ReadyAPI | 1. Connect and test every API type. 2. Add complex assertion logic without any scripting or code. 3. Flexible API testing options for continuous integration and deployment. 4. Comprehensive reporting and analytics. 5. Drive real-world data throughout your testing. | Integrated platform for comprehensive API testing and automation. | Starts at $759/year | Yes |
Top API Protection Tools in 2025
1. Apigee
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Apigee Edge is a platform for managing and developing APIs. It helps add a proxy layer to your application. It works on the backend, allowing projects/applications and APIs to deliver data securely through any cloud.
It also works on multi-cloud platforms. With its help, you can secure, scale, and detect your entire API to handle the load and spot bugs and threats before they become attacks and cause damage.
Apigee allows you to perform the necessary steps before making your service available to the web, including monitoring (add, change, or remove) security, monetization, measurability, compliance, and these checkpoints to keep your services up and running.
This API protection tool allows you to change backend service implementations without breaking public APIs. Apigee Edge has various built-in features for leveraging analytics, developer portals, and more.
Why Do We Recommend It?
- Apigee provides API design and modeling tools based on standards such as OpenAPI (previously Swagger) and GraphQL.
- Apigee allows you to establish API proxies mediating between your backend services and API consumers.
- Apigee has a developer portal where API consumers may find, explore, and test APIs.
- Apigee provides caching solutions to improve API performance and relieve backend system stress.
| What is Good? | What Could Be Better? |
|---|---|
| Mobilization and validation for the APIs | External Developer Platform is hard to understand |
| Rich with features | iPaaS(Integrated Platform as a Service) is not available |
| Minimal Configuration required | Customization in policies and management is pretty tough to do |
| Provides Out of the box policies | Limited caching capabilities |
2. Assertible
Assertible protects your application by implementing simple and powerful assertions. Updating and adding API tests can be daunting, but Assertible’s synchronization capabilities make it easy.
Assertible integrates with other tools, like GitHub, and sends notifications to Slack when errors occur. It helps build reliable web application monitoring.
Use Assertible to track application deployments and automatically run post-deployment smoke tests in staging or production. Assertible’s powerful and robust HTTP assertions let you create domain-specific tests so you’ll be the first to know when problems arise.
Assertible lets you test your APIs against industry-standard patterns, validate response data, create functional test cases, and set up synthetic monitoring.
Why Do We Recommend It?
- Assertible allows you to create test suites that can be executed automatically or on a schedule.
- Data-driven testing is supported by Assertible, allowing you to test different situations by parameterizing your test inputs.
- Assertible provides monitoring capabilities to continually ensure the health and performance of your APIs and web services.
- Assertible connects with various third-party applications and services, including Slack, GitHub, Bitbucket, and others, to offer notifications and updates.
| What is Good? | What Could Be Better? |
|---|---|
| Allows automation of QA | The platform might not be convenient if you like viewing a detailed quality report of your web services |
| Easy detection of system failures | Interface usability is not good |
| Allows for periodic monitoring and testing of your web services and provides alerts for detected failures. |
3. Karate
Karate is the only open-source tool that combines API test automation, performance testing, mocking, and UI automation into a single integrated framework. It’s also a cross-platform platform that lets you test APIs and web applications written in any language.
Tests and code coexist within the IDE. The Shift-Left feature makes it easy to pre-test and merge. It has various plugins, such as Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IntelliJ.
The plugin integrates with remote development environments such as GitHub Codespaces, Gitpod, and Gitlab. Karate can be easily integrated into your CI/CD pipeline.
Karate supports data-driven testing, also known as Java code. You can test gPRC, Kafka, WebSockets, database calls, and asynchronous flows.
Why Do We Recommend It?
- Karate employs Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) syntax, allowing you to design more human-readable and collaborative tests.
- It enables you to execute data-driven testing by running the same scenario with varied input values using data tables and examples.
- Karate allows parallel test execution, which can significantly shorten the test suite’s execution time, enhancing efficiency.
- Karate supports external configuration files for maintaining environment-specific variables, making it easier to manage several testing setups.
| What is Good? | What Could Be Better? |
|---|---|
| It is straightforward to set up and run tests. | Karate uses its scripting language |
| very little programming knowledge is required. | There is no IntelliSense support in the IDE |
| Karate features a compelling JSON validation | Finding errors in code is not easy |
4. AppKnox
AppKnox helps you release APIs faster and identify potential vulnerabilities in web servers, databases, and other components that interact with your server. It also provides mobile application security through API security.
This API protection tool is fast and popular as it can provide a full VA report in less than 90 minutes.
It can be easily activated with just a few clicks from the same dashboard, where you can manage other Vulnerability Assessment (VA) activities, such as static code analysis and DAST tools.
Also, no false alarms indicate that this tool can be used accurately. By turning on or off various API endpoints, you can perform a dynamic scan and collect the APIs you want to collect. Then, you can start scanning with one click.
A detailed evaluation gives you a clearer picture of what is happening with your API. It is also password-protected for added security.
Why Do We Recommend It?
- Appknox automates the process of security scanning for mobile apps across various platforms (iOS, Android) to identify vulnerabilities such as insecure data storage, code vulnerabilities, insecure communication, and more.
- Appknox analyzes mobile application source codes to uncover potential security concerns before compiling and deploying the app.
- Appknox can replicate real-world attack scenarios, assisting in identifying potential security flaws that criminal actors may exploit.
- Appknox supports reviewing mobile app source code for security best practices and vulnerabilities.
| What is Good? | What Could Be Better? |
|---|---|
| Easy to Use | Test Cases are not up to date |
| Robust Testing Tool | Manual scenarios in reports and other formats while exporting reports (e.g, Excel) |
| Rapidly scans for Static, dynamic, and integration testing with options to review the code manually | No AWS Integration for CI/CD |
| Automated test for 20+ test cases |
5. Insomnia
Insomnia combines a user-friendly interface with advanced features such as authentication wizards, code generation, and environment variables.
Centralizing APIs with Insomnia Test Suites makes it easy to check valid API functionality and improve development efficiency through CI/CD pipelines.
This API protection tool creates custom API test flows that enable extensive REST, SOAP, GraphQL, and GRPC API validation via custom Insomnia Test Suite scripts.
Insomnia’s CLI tool, Insomnia Inso, makes it easy to build CI/CD pipelines for automated API testing across platforms such as GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, Travis CI, CircleCI, and more.
Why Do We Recommend It?
- Insomnia’s user-friendly interface allows you to generate, organize, and manage API calls.
- Insomnia supports the use of environment variables and dynamic values, making it easier to manage several environments (e.g., development, and production) within a single request.
- Insomnia provides response time tracking, which allows you to monitor API performance and detect potential bottlenecks.
- Insomnia offers plugins and extensions, which can be used to extend its functionality, such as adding new authentication methods or connecting with other programs.
| What is Good? | What Could Be Better? |
|---|---|
| The user interface is simple. | Not used by most of the clients, which shows problems in working with this |
| It is a lightweight tool | Support lacks a little bit |
| Quick and Easy deployment of requests through different APIs | Automatic API testing is not present |
6. Rest-Assured
REST Assured is an open-source API protection tool that combines the simplicity of languages like Ruby and Groovy in the Java domain. It uses a Java library as a headless web service client.
The Rest Assured library can test and validate your server’s HTTP responses, response status codes, bodies, messages, headers, and more. It supports POST, GET, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS, PATCH, and HEAD requests.
Build tools such as Maven and unit testing frameworks such as JUnit and TestNG integrate well with RestAssured and can also see the exempt output.
Functional, integration, mocking, and API testing methods make it an effective backend API automation tool. No matter how sophisticated the JSON structure is, practically every portion of the request and answer may be retrieved.
Why Do We Recommend It?
- Rest-Assured allows you to specify specific API calls and expected answers.
- Rest-Assured supports various HTTP methods, including GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH, and others.
- Rest-Assured supports a variety of authentication mechanisms, such as Basic Authentication, OAuth, and Bearer Tokens.
- Rest-Assured enables you to interact with cookies and manage sessions for required APIs.
| What is Good? | What Could Be Better? |
|---|---|
| The framework contains simple core Java, making it easy for the users to learn and function. | The one with no prior knowledge of Java cannot use the tool. |
| After the API automation, the front end can focus on the UI and client-side operations. | It explicitly doesn’t support the Soap APIs |
7. Fiddler
Fiddler is an API protection tool known among developers and testers as the best API tester for building and validating APIs served over HTTPS. Capture API traffic from existing clients and modify and extend your tests as needed.
Check whether the API returns correct responses to the various requests it accepts, how it responds to errors and unexpected inputs, and issues responses within the required time.
Within Fiddler’s API Test Studio, HTTPS traffic is captured. The session is imported as a test and modified to cover all automated scenarios.
Run API tests by importing SAZ (Session Archive ZIP) files supported by Test Studio load testing, configure the number of virtual users and runtime, and generate load immediately or on a specified schedule can be generated.
A command-line interface makes it easy to integrate with your continuous integration server. Test results are collected in XML format and analyzed by most CI servers. It can add new tests to prove performance, security, and error handling.
Why Do We Recommend It?
- Fiddler intercepts and captures HTTP and HTTPS communication between a client (a browser or a mobile app) and a server, allowing you to inspect and analyze requests and responses.
- Fiddler allows you to change and manipulate requests before submitting them to the server. This is excellent for testing and debugging different scenarios.
- Fiddler can intercept and debug WebSocket traffic, allowing you to examine WebSocket conversation.
- Fiddler can decompress compressed answers (e.g., gzip) and compress requests automatically, allowing it to replicate real-world conditions.
| What is Good? | What Could Be Better? |
|---|---|
| It is easy for customers to verify the integrity and reliability of the APIs | Automatic decoding is not present. |
| It can incorporate API testing in a continuous delivery process. | The documentation of some complex features is lacking in the tool |
| It is the fastest way to generate the API tests as it can capture traffic from nearly any source means | There is complexity in adding new rules to the fiddler |
8. SoapUI
SoapUI is an API protection tool developed in 2006 and the only open-source tool that allows the creation and execution of automated functional, security, load, and mock test sets.
The entry point for API testing is quickly validating REST, SOAP, and GraphQL-based services. This has benefited developers and testers and made it the industry’s number one API testing tool.
JMS enterprise messaging layer, databases, rich internet applications, and more. It’s like a test cover. You can run any test method using the tool’s command line from any task scheduler. Right-click to create extended stress tests based on existing functional tests.
Mocking Service reduces the cost of creating complete mockups of production systems by creating REST and SOAP test cases, allowing consumers to access services without waiting to be created or made available. make it possible.
Why Do We Recommend It?
- SoapUI allows you to develop and run SOAP and RESTful web service tests.
- SoapUI supports SOAP and RESTful web services, making it adaptable for testing various APIs.
- SoapUI enables data-driven testing by allowing you to drive your test cases with external data sources (CSV, databases, Excel).
- SoapUI can perform load testing and monitor web service performance under various loads and circumstances.
| What is Good? | What Could Be Better? |
|---|---|
| It has an easy-to-use graphical interface and enterprise-class features. | It functions slowly while setting up a new project. |
| It has a code-free test environment. | The UI design is not user-friendly, and it does not allow users to find all the features. |
| Creating new TestSuites, adding TestCases, or adding assertions to your TestCases is easy. | The purchasing of the pro version is expensive for collaboration on a single project |
9. Salt Security
Salt Security is an API protection platform that provides context-based security for all APIs. It processes all API traffic over the application and discovers APIs and their exposed data using AI/ML and cloud-based big data engines to mitigate API attacks.
It applies to scan and testing in the build, deploys, and runtime phases to eliminate the API vulnerabilities. It has patented API Context Engine (ACE) architecture that baselines the environment and identifies anomalies.
It can analyze API traffic over days, weeks, and even months. The API cycle consists of a plan, code, build, test, release, deploy, operate, and monitor phases. Use OAS analysis in the early stages to identify vulnerabilities, then identify flaws in pre-pod business logic and match API tests to patterns.
During deployment, sensitive data will be analyzed and categorized into API calls and responses. We serve more than 500 global enterprises and disruptors than any other provider.
Why Do We Recommend It?
- Salt Security protects APIs from various dangers, such as data breaches, unauthorized access, and API misuse.
- Salt Security uses behavior analysis and machine learning to comprehend regular API traffic patterns and discover deviations that may suggest attacks or vulnerabilities.
- It may offer tools for assessing API security posture and identifying potential vulnerabilities.
- Salt Security may provide recommendations and best practices for securing APIs and avoiding typical security mistakes.
| What is Good? | What Could Be Better? |
|---|---|
| The tool makes tracking and stopping attackers easier as it gathers all users’ activity. | The SIEM logging integrations are missing native action logging. |
| It is informative about the public API endpoint use. | Reporting correctly as unique items is challenging to get APIs going through a gateway. |
| The industry’s only research team focused on API security is Salt Security. | It doesn’t have more options to extract the detailed statistical data. |
10. ReadyAPI
ReadyAPI is an API protection tool that creates a testing platform and improves quality for Agile and DevOps software teams. Teams can create, manage, and run automated functional, security, and performance tests on any platform.
Underneath that, his three modules come into play: ReadyAPI Test, ReadyAPI Performance, and ReadyAPI Virtualization. Test modules let you test with or without scripts and add security scans at the push of a button.
The performance module validates tests for real-world traffic conditions. The virtualization module virtualizes web services such as RESTful, SOAP, TCP, and JMS, removing dependencies on development phases. Use VirtServer to run virtual services over the network.
Why Do We Recommend It?
- ReadyAPI enables you to write and run functional tests for REST, SOAP, GraphQL, and other APIs.
- ReadyAPI facilitates data-driven testing by allowing you to parameterize your test cases using external data sources (databases, spreadsheets, and files).
- By allowing you to develop and run regression test suites, ReadyAPI ensures that modifications to your APIs do not generate new issues.
- REST, SOAP, GraphQL, JMS, AMQP, and more protocols are supported by ReadyAPI.
| What is Good? | What Could Be Better? |
|---|---|
| Easy to set up and perform a comprehensive setup load test. | In the case of extensive data processed through API, the tool doesn’t respond fast. |
| It performs testing even in complex scenarios, such as data loops, conditional steps, delay/waiting steps, transfer/linkage steps, etc. | The UI design of the tool can be improved for customization. |
| Runs load tests on several machines due to its scaling capabilities. | The free users cannot access all the features as the tool is not open source. |
The post <strong>10 Best API Protection Tools</strong> in 2025 appeared first on Cyber Security News.