Author: Shahar Binyamin

Enterprise security teams have had since 2015 to familiarize themselves with GraphQL API security. But many — if not most — still haven’t captured the security nuances of the popular open-source query language. Simply understanding GraphQL’s processes and vulnerable attack vectors isn’t sufficient; it’s also necessary to recognize exploit attempts and nefarious queries (and trigger actions whenever those threats arise). A complete GraphQL security strategy must also be ready to defeat attacks designed to infiltrate GraphQL specifically. A more generalized API security strategy isn’t going to cut it, as headlines continue to prove. 

Security teams likely have either a web application firewall (WAF) performing active application monitoring to detect threats or a comparable in-house solution that leverages access logs to monitor threat behavior. They also likely depend on specific indicators when monitoring for anomalous activity — including HTTP methods and response status codes, sensitive API routes, and API parameters. Keeping an eye on these indicators can identify attacks where clients try to overwhelm a registration endpoint, perform multiple unsuccessful logins, attempt account enumeration, or tamper with key parameters.

How do enterprises start their API modernization journeys? More often than not, it’s with a single developer who recognizes all that production-grade GraphQL API adoption can bring to the table—and decides to act as the catalyst for organizational change.

As a fully open-source technology, the GraphQL API query language gives developers more efficient workflows and streamlined access to enterprise scalability. Because GraphQL enables applications to collect all the data they require by making a single API request (and control that data directly), the development pace, simplicity, and stability of working with GraphQL provide night-and-day advantages over legacy REST APIs. For enterprise developers, there’s no real difficulty in setting up GraphQL and getting a server up and running. The challenge usually begins when they need to win their organization’s full backing to achieve a lasting implementation with all the stability and security an enterprise requires from Day One.