Billions of devices and systems made more secure with Cloudflare API Gateway

Cloudflare, Inc., the security, performance, and reliability company assisting in the development of a better Internet, has announced the Cloudflare API Gateway, which provides businesses with a simple, fast, and effective way to protect and control all of their APIs (application programming interfaces). APIs are being used by organizations more than ever before, but many are struggling to secure this traffic because legacy solutions are often expensive, overly complex, and slow. The Cloudflare API Gateway will make it easier to find, secure, and manage APIs of any protocol on one of the world’s largest and most interconnected networks.

APIs power the world—our phones, smartwatches, banking systems, and shopping sites all rely on them to communicate—and API traffic accounts for more than half of all HTTP requests on Cloudflare’s global network. With this rapid expansion, it is more important than ever for businesses of all sizes to have strong protection and a clear view of their API suite.

According to Gartner: “API security challenges have emerged as a top concern for most software engineering leaders, as unmanaged and unsecured APIs create vulnerabilities that could accelerate multimillion dollar security incidents.” 

However, traditional legacy solutions are often difficult to implement, expensive to run, and unreasonably slow. Now, Cloudflare API Gateway provides a single hub allowing businesses to quickly discover APIs they weren’t aware of and easily secure them in just a few clicks.

“APIs were never built with security in mind. Yet, today APIs are involved in nearly every app a consumer or employee touches, often carrying our sensitive personal data,” said Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare. “Every day Cloudflare’s network blocks about 86 billion cyber threats for our customers. We’re confident that no other API tool sees the breadth or volume of threats that we do. We’ve built next generation AI and Machine Learning engines that take API management to a new level; automatically detecting new APIs and preventing threats. As with other Cloudflare products, API Gateway will do all of this at a fraction of the cost and without the latency introduced by legacy solutions.”

With Cloudflare API Gateway, businesses will be able to:

• Identify and stop API abuse: Leveraging Cloudflare’s unique Machine Learning engine that processes 32+ million requests per second, customers can now automatically analyze their API traffic to detect and prevent API abuses.
• Automatically detect unmanaged APIs: As API use grows, sometimes developers may publish APIs that security teams aren’t aware of. Cloudflare API Gateway passively scans the entire network and automatically lists API endpoints for complete visibility.
• Create and manage APIs directly with Cloudflare Workers: Customers will be able to use integrations with Cloudflare Workers to create lightweight, dynamic APIs that run at our edge.
• Offload authentication and authorization: The gateway will support industry protocols like OAuth 2.0, JSON Web Tokens (JWT) as well as leverage authentication methods available in Cloudflare Access such as Mutual TLS and service tokens.
• Seamlessly route, log, and measure API requests: Cloudflare’s existing products, like Transform Rules, will introduce native gateway functionality without adding latency, helping keep Cloudflare’s API Gateway as fast as possible.

Schema Validation, API Discovery, mTLS, and API Abuse detection are available today, with remaining features coming later this year.