Help Center/ Data Security Center/ User Guide/ API Data Security Protection/ API Data Security Protection Overview
Updated on 2025-08-12 GMT+08:00
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API Data Security Protection Overview

API data security protection is a comprehensive system provided for enterprises.

This system automatically identifies request interfaces of web application systems and application programming interfaces (APIs) to discover sensitive data. It visually displays sensitive data assets and implements data authorization based on users, interfaces, and accounts. The system ensures fine-grained data access control for applications and APIs, dynamic data masking of application request results, digital watermarks for web page results, security protection, and full-process source tracing for data leakage. Additionally, it includes data security functions such as application access security log audit, risk identification, and situation analysis, ensuring data security for the normal use and transfer of service data in the application system.

Why Do We Need to Ensure Application Data Security?

  • Various challenges for application data security: As IT develops and application system service innovates, data is increasingly valuable. Black and gray markets keep trying to obtain application data illegally.
  • Prominent data security issues of API services: API is a special form of application systems. The data security issues are non-stoppable, making it hard to ensure security. According to statistics from relevant organizations, more than 90% of data breaches in the past two years are caused by API issues. Data breaches occurred among various industries, including finance, Internet, and government.
  • Increasingly strict laws and regulations: To ensure application data security and prevent data breach, theft, and tampering, laws and regulations are established worldwide.

What Security Risks Do Application Data Face?

There are various security risks for application data:

  • External attacks: External attacks on application systems and APIs are the main threats. Some may even cause service interruption. Commonly, the weak identity authentication and authorization of applications and APIs, as well as vulnerability injection are the reasons for being attacked. External attacks include the following types: account theft, DDoS attacks, vulnerability exploitation attacks, crawler attacks, and robot attacks.
  • Internal data breach: To damage system and obtain sensitive data such as private information illegally, black and gray markets continuously attack applications and APIs, causing huge internal threats. The following can cause internal breach risks: incomplete identity authentication mechanism, abuse of application access permissions, and abnormal access to sensitive data.

How Does API Data Security Protection Work?

To address security risks of application data, API data security protection provides an integrated protection solution. Figure 1 shows the working process of API data security protection.

Figure 1 Working process

API data security protection is deployed between the application client, internal application services, and data platform. It offers data security functions like fine-grained data access control at the API level, sensitive data identification, data masking, API watermarking, data breach prevention, application access security alerts, and risk situation analysis.

Parent Topic: API Data Security Protection