Positive security for APIs from your OpenAPI spec

Over the last few months we have spent a lot of time on positive security for APIs from your OpenAPI spec. This is what we learned.

Observability first

Every mitigation decision is logged with its reasons, and every log line can be traced to the rule and score components that produced it. When a customer asks why a request was challenged, the answer is a link, not a guess.

Logs stream to the customer’s SIEM within seconds, which also means their security team sees attacks in the same tools they use for everything else.

Compliance is a side effect

Regulators increasingly ask for evidence of resilience, not just promises. An incident timeline with start, peak, vectors and impact is exactly the evidence DORA and NIS2 ask for — and it falls out of good observability for free.

We export incident reports in formats auditors can file without anyone rewriting them.

Measuring success

We track three numbers for every incident: time to mitigation, the share of attack traffic that reached the origin, and the share of legitimate traffic that was challenged. The first should be under a second, the second under 0.1% and the third under 1%.

Those numbers go into every incident report, and they are the same numbers we are measured against in our SLA.

Why per-route baselines matter

A thousand requests per second to your homepage is Tuesday. A thousand requests per second to your password-reset endpoint is an attack. Global rate limits cannot tell the difference; per-route baselines can.

We learn the normal shape of traffic per route and per hour of the week, so a surge on a sensitive endpoint raises the risk score long before it approaches a global threshold.

What we changed

We moved the decision from a single threshold to a continuous score, added an explanation to every decision and made every rule testable against historical traffic before it goes live.

The result is fewer late-night pages for our analysts and — more importantly — fewer real users challenged by mistake.

The numbers

Across the last quarter, 71% of challenged clients never attempted a solution, 24% solved one challenge and then behaved normally, and 5% solved challenges repeatedly while continuing to attack — the last group is where analysts spend their time.

Median added latency for legitimate visitors that were challenged was 280 ms on desktop and 410 ms on mid-range Android devices.

We will follow up with the numbers from the next quarter.