And all those mechanisms are valid, but we still need to avoid attackers trying to cause a DoS (Denial-of-service), as well as try to fuzz the requests; and/or try to avoid them skipping rate-limiting mechanisms we have in place. We, also, must be sure about the validity of the identities consuming our APIs.
We need to make them invisible to the attackers to avoid most of the things I am referring to. Invisible? Yes, you’ve read it well.
But how can I make them invisible but at the same time reachable from the internet and consumable by developers? That can be quite a challenge, and a non-sense at the same time.
To continue with the ideas that I’ve shared at the beginning of this article, I can also mention that one of my favorite music bands is OMD (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark). They had several hits in their career, such as Secret, Tesla Girls, Electricity, etc. And just as OMD used to make those Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, we need to make something similar for our APIs if we want to turn them into the dark side of the cloud.
Dark services can be accessed through a public environment (internet) but just for the consumers we want, and for the rest, they will remain invisible. But we are not going to use VPNs or whitelisting in our Firewall. We are not going to open new ports into our firewall, nor use a Reverse-Proxy, none of that. All our resources are going to remain private.
This means that our APIs are not going to be exposed to the internet, they are going to be sitting privately. But with Netfoundry.io we will let external organizations use them but in a very highly secured way. Our public APIs will be turned into dark services: reachable for valid consumers, unreachable for the rest.
