API discovery and configuration

The API Behavioral Security (ABS) AI Engine works in tandem with API Security Enforcer (ASE) to automatically discover new and unknown application programming interface (API)s in your ecosystem.

You can view the discovered APIs by using the ABS discovery REST API. You can also add the discovered APIs to ASE by using API Discovery in the PingIntelligence for APIs Dashboard. For more information, see Discovered APIs.

Configuring API discovery

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To configure API discovery in your environment:

Steps

Enable ABS in ASE.
Define root API JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) in ASE.

ABS discovers APIs only for a root API JSON in ASE.
Optionally, configure OAuth token and API Key parameters in root API JSON.
Configure discovery related parameters using Global configuration update REST API.

Use the update.sh script to edit the default values related to API discovery. For more information on update script, see Managing discovery intervals.

Configuring ASE for API discovery

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The following table summarizes the variables related to API discovery that you need to configure.

API discovery variables
Variable	Description
`api_discovery`	Set this variable to true to switch on API discovery. To switch off API discovery, set it to false. The default value is true.
`discovery_initial_period`	The initial time in hours during which APIs are discovered in your API ecosystem. The default and minimum value is 1-hour.
`discovery_update_interval`	The time interval in hours at which any new discovered APIs are reported. The default and minimum value is 1-hour.
`discovery_subpath`	The number of sub-paths that is discovered in an API. The minimum value is 1 and maximum value is 6. For more information, see Discovery sub-paths.
`url_limit`	Defines the maximum number of URLs that are reported in a discovered API.

To configure ASE for API discovery:

Steps

Enable ABS in ASE by running the enable_abs command in ASE:

./bin/cli.sh -u admin -p admin enable_abs
ABS is now enabled

To verify, run the status command in ASE:

./bin/cli.sh status
API Security Enforcer
status                  : started
mode                    : sideband
http/ws                 : port 80
https/wss               : port 443
firewall                : enabled
abs                     : enabled, ssl: enabled
abs attack              : disabled
audit                   : enabled
sideband authentication : disabled
ase detected attack     : disabled
attack list memory      : configured 128.00 MB, used 25.60 MB, free 102.40 MB
google pubsub           : disabled

To configure root API in ASE, define root API in ASE.

If you have configured other APIs in ASE along with the root API, ABS monitors traffic only on the root API for the discovery process. A root API in ASE is an API for which the API JSON file has url as “/” and hostname as “*”.

If API discovery is enabled in ABS without root API in ASE and you run the discovery REST API, it displays an error message: root API not configured in ASE. To discover APIs configure root API in ASE.

Example:

The following is a snippet of root API JSON:

{
    "api_metadata": {
        "protocol": "http",
        "url": "/",
        "hostname": "*",

        "cookie": "",
        "oauth2_access_token": false,
        "apikey_qs": "",
        "apikey_header": "",
        "enable_blocking": false,
        "cookie_idle_timeout": "200m",
        "logout_api_enabled": false,
        "cookie_persistence_enabled": false,
        "login_url": "",
        "api_mapping": {
            "internal_url": ""
        },

A sample root API ships with ASE in /pingidentity/ase/config/api directory.

Configure API JSON by configuring the settings for cookie, oauth2_access_token, apikey_qs, or apikey_header in the root API JSON file in ASE.

API discovery process discovers these parameters in an API only when you set these in the root API. API discovery reports these attributes of an API only when it receives at least 50% of traffic having these attributes. For example, if the root API receives 100 requests and 51 requests have OAuth token, then the OAuth token is reported in the discovered API. Similarly, if the same traffic has less than 50% traffic for API keys or cookies, then they are not reported in the discovered API.

Configure API discovery in ABS by setting the api_discovery parameter to true using Global configuration update REST API.

If you want update the values on an already running system, use the update.sh script. For more information on the update script, see Managing discovery intervals.