The Role of PKI and Certificate Lifecycle Management in API Security

Imagine booking a flight online. You check airline schedules, compare ticket prices, reserve seats, and make payments—all on a single website. This seamless experience is made possible by the power of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that enable different applications, like the airline’s booking system, payment gateways, and our email provider, to communicate and work together in real-time.

APIs are the building blocks of modern application architectures. Developers increasingly use them to integrate advanced features into their applications without building everything from scratch. Whether it’s embedding payment gateways, maps, weather info, or social media sharing, APIs can help do it all effortlessly in less time, driving innovation faster.

However, This Widespread Adoption of APIs Comes With a Price

According to recent research, API calls now account for a staggering 71% of all web traffic. This kind of explosive growth has brought with it an alarming increase in security risks. Threats, such as malicious API requests, DDoS attacks, brute force intrusions, and account takeovers or misuse, are escalating.

As APIs, by nature, are complex to manage and protect, attackers are eager to exploit them to access, intercept, or manipulate sensitive transactions and data. Without robust security measures tailored for APIs, your organization is at risk of data breaches, critical business disruption, and compliance failures.

A 2024 report from Akamai revealed that 108 billion API attacks were recorded from January 2023 through June 2024.

To mitigate these API-related risks and ensure the integrity of applications and their connected services, you must build a holistic security strategy that addresses the unique risks and complexities of today’s API-driven application landscape.

In this blog, we’ll discuss the challenges of API security, the role of PKI and digital certificates in securing API access and communications, and how Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) automation solutions like AppViewX AVX ONE CLM can help tighten API security.

API Security Challenges

• API sprawl: Increased adoption of microservices architectures and the integration of AI within DevOps pipelines has massively expanded the creation and use of APIs. At the same time, the fast-pace of modern application development—where APIs are continuously created, updated, and retired—creates a state of constant flux in the API ecosystem. The relentless growth, combined with frequent changes, have made API management a daunting challenge for security teams.
• Lack of Visibility: On average, organizations manage over 600 APIs, yet many lack complete visibility into their API ecosystem. Without proper discovery mechanisms or a centralized inventory, organizations often fail to track and manage their APIs effectively. This oversight leads to shadow and zombie APIs, forgotten and unmanaged APIs, which are often the root cause of unauthorized access, lateral movement within systems, and data breaches. Due to the lack of visibility, security teams remain blind to these hidden risks and cannot detect or mitigate them on time.
• Poor API Access Control: Controlling access to APIs remains a significant challenge for organizations. Many still rely on outdated or weak authentication methods, which are prime targets for attackers seeking unauthorized access to applications and sensitive data. While much focus is placed on user authentication, machine authentication—the process of verifying workloads and devices interacting with APIs—is often overlooked. This oversight creates a dangerous security gap. If machines are not authenticating when accessing APIs, attackers can exploit these machines as backdoors to infiltrate systems and orchestrate more attacks—all while remaining undetected.
• Weak API Governance: As API usage soars, API security and privacy measures are growing too. Regulatory frameworks, such as PCI DSS v4.0, now require organizations transmitting or processing card payments to proactively address API vulnerabilities, enforce strong authentication protocols, and implement strict access controls. Failure to comply with these requirements can result in steep fines and reputational damage. Despite these growing requirements, many organizations lack the necessary tools and strategies to secure APIs, monitor access, and ensure compliance.

PKI – A Critical Enabler of Trust in API Integrations

Establishing robust Identity and Access Management (IAM) practices for machines is one of the critical first steps in securing APIs. This is where Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and digital certificates come into play. They help address two essential aspects of API security – Authentication and Encryption.

• Authentication is the first line of defense in API security. Implementing strong authentication mechanisms ensures that only authorized users and machines (workloads, and devices) can call your APIs.

Digital certificates help implement a reliable and robust authentication framework for machines calling APIs through Mutual TLS (mTLS).

mTLS is a method where both parties in an API interaction, the client and the API (service), mutually authenticate each other using digital certificates. mTLS ensures that only trusted clients can establish connections with your APIs, enhancing the security of API communications. By issuing digital certificates to all publicly accessible and internal APIs, security and IAM teams can help mitigate unauthorized access and lateral movement to API to a great degree.

• Encryption, on the other hand, helps protect data transferred via APIs. It helps prevent data interception or tampering in transit, preserving data confidentiality and integrity.

Issuing digital certificates to API servers helps encrypt communications through Transport Layer Security (TLS), often in the form of HTTPS. This ensures that data transmitted between the client and API server remains confidential and cannot be intercepted or manipulated by malicious actors.

Despite knowing the importance of digital certificates in securing APIs, managing certificates effectively is still a struggle for many organizations. As the number of digital certificates grows, manual certificate management has become increasingly challenging. Spreadsheets and ad hoc tools do not provide visibility and centralized control necessary to manage certificates at scale, leaving organizations vulnerable to service outages, security vulnerabilities, and compliance issues.

How AppViewX AVX ONE CLM Simplifies and Streamlines API Certificate Management

The key to overcoming certificate lifecycle management challenges lies in automation. An advanced CLM automation solution like the AppViewX AVX ONE CLM takes the complexity out of managing digital certificates through visibility, automation, and control. This ensures that API endpoints consistently have valid credentials, reducing the risk of security lapses.

Here’s how AVX ONE CLM helps manage certificates effectively and strengthens API security:

1. Certificate Discovery and Visibility

The importance of locating every API in the infrastructure cannot be understated. You cannot manage or protect an API if you do not know it exists. AVX ONE CLM simplifies this challenge by helping you run an automated, CA-agnostic discovery of all TLS and client certificates securing APIs across your hybrid or multi-cloud environments.

By running a discovery scan on the network port, AVX ONE CLM identifies all API endpoints and the certificates deployed on them. Following this discovery process, all certificates are consolidated into a centralized inventory, offering a unified, single-pane-of-glass view and management of certificates and their associated metadata. Additionally, the endpoints associated with these discovered API certificates are organized into a dedicated device inventory, enhancing API tracking and oversight.

This comprehensive visibility into certificates across your API landscape eliminates the risk of unknown, rogue, or non-compliant certificates while helping you gain better control over your API ecosystem.

2. End-to-End CLM Automation

Effective certificate management is essential for maintaining secure API access. AVX ONE CLM streamlines the entire certificate lifecycle through full automation, covering every stage, starting with certificate enrollment and issuance to the last mile steps of certificate provisioning, like binding the certificate to the correct API endpoint. Renewals are also fully automated, promoting crypto-agility and helping mitigate possible outages and vulnerabilities from expiring certificates. With AVX ONE CLM’s advanced automated workflows, you can also configure any number of CLM actions, triggers, and approvals, reducing administrative burden and preventing misconfigurations.

Another key feature of AVX ONE CLM is its certificate self-service capability, which empowers cross-functional teams to independently generate, request, and issue certificates from approved public and private Certificate Authorities (CA). Support for crucial auto-enrollment protocols like ACME, SCEP, and EST simplifies certificate lifecycle management (CLM) for APIs.

Further, AVX ONE CLM offers out-of-the-box integrations with leading DevOps tools, API gateways, cloud providers, cloud orchestration tools, and public/private CAs. These integrations allow for seamless CLM automation, enhanced crypto-agility, and secure API communications across distributed applications. AVX ONE CLM can also integrate with Web Application Firewalls (WAFs), which offer further API protection. Alongside, to ensure secure communications between API endpoints, you can enforce mTLS through AVX ONE CLM for Kubernetes solution that integrates with service meshes. As a result, platform engineering teams and developers can move quickly while providing security teams with the oversight they need.

3. Centralized Policy Control and Governance

Standardizing certificate processes is key to regulating access to certificates and keys and eliminating security and compliance issues. AVX ONE CLM allows PKI administrators to define and enforce an enterprise-wide PKI policy to ensure adherence to best practices in certificate issuance, use of crypto-standards, and access privileges, eliminating the risk of weak and non-compliant certificates. Along with policies and governance, AVX ONE CLM also provides role-based access control (RBAC) to enable conditional access and ensure secure certificate provisioning. Administrators can tag certificates with additional metadata and group them based on business needs, applications, or teams for easy access and policy management. This kind of centralized policy control promotes a cohesive approach to API security, ensuring that all cross-functional teams adhere to best practices and compliance standards.

4. Reporting and Alerting

API certificates and keys must be continuously monitored for expirations and vulnerabilities to prevent outages and security incidents. AVX ONE CLM provides custom alerts for certificate expiry notifications to ensure timely renewals, approvals, or escalations. AVX ONE CLM also provides audit logs and pre-configured dashboard reports for audits and regulatory compliance. Users can customize these reports as per their needs. Audit logs record all certificate-related activities and configuration changes to make both internal and external audits easier. These logs can be transported into enterprise log storage systems for long-term storage as per enterprise policies. You can also generate periodic reports on certificate and key compliance to keep up with industry standards.

5. Secure Certificate and Key Storage

AVX ONE CLM enforces secure key management by generating them either on the target machine, key management system (KMS), or in the hardware security module (HSM). Automated workflows pushing certificates and keys to associated devices further minimize human access to keys, preventing unauthorized key roaming and any potential key compromise.

Strengthen API Security with PKI and CLM Automation

APIs are the essential cogs in the engines driving modern digital innovation, but their rapid growth and complexity introduce significant security challenges. By leveraging Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for strong authentication and encryption, you can create a foundation of trust for API interactions.

However, managing digital certificates at scale requires automation. Solutions like AppViewX AVX ONE CLM empower organizations to streamline certificate lifecycle management, enhance visibility, enforce policies, and ensure compliance, all while maintaining robust security across the API ecosystem.

For a deeper dive into how AppViewX can help with your PKI and CLM in API security, talk to one of our experts today.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blogs Archive - AppViewX authored by Krupa Patil. Read the original post at: https://www.appviewx.com/blogs/the-role-of-pki-and-certificate-lifecycle-management-in-api-security/