Akto.io API Security

Contributors

What is Akto?

How it works • Getting-Started • API Inventory • API testing • Add Test • Join Discord community •

Akto is an instant, open source API security platform that takes only 60 secs to get started. Akto is used by security teams to maintain a continuous inventory of APIs, test APIs for vulnerabilities and find runtime issues. Akto offers coverage for all OWASP top 10 and HackerOne Top 10 categories including BOLA, authentication, SSRF, XSS, security configurations, etc. Akto's powerful testing engine runs variety of business logic tests by reading traffic data to understand API traffic pattern leading to reduced false positives. Akto can integrate with multiple traffic sources - burpsuite, AWS, postman, GCP, gateways, etc. Here is our public roadmap for this quarter.

Akto enables security and engineering teams to secure their APIs by doing three things:

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/91306853/216407351-d18c396b-5cd0-4cbc-a350-10a76b1d67b3.mp4

How it works?

Step 1: Create inventory

Step 2: Run tests

How to get Started?

Using docker-compose (works for any machine which has Docker installed)

Run the following commands to install Akto. You'll need to have curl and Docker installed in order to run the container..

Clone the Akto repo by using this command git clone https://github.com/akto-api-security/akto.git
Go to the cloned directory cd akto
Run docker-compose up -d

If you are setting this up in your own Cloud (AWS/GCP/Heroku), read this section

Please ensure the following for good security practices

Open inbound security rule for port 9090 only. And restrict the source CIDR to VPC CIDR or your IP only.
Use an EC2 from a private subnet -

a. This way, no one will be able to make an inbound request to your machine.

b. Ensure this private subnet has access to Internet so that outbound calls can succeed!

c. You might have to set up tunneling to access instance via VPN using ssh -i pemfile ec2-user@vpn-public-instance -L 9090:private-instance:9090

d. In your browser, visit http://private-instance:9090
Use an EC2 from a public subnet - please don't! If you still want to do this, you can skip 2.b and 2.c. Simply access your instance via http://ip:9090

Akto is really powerful in Cloud deployment if you can provide your application's mirrored traffic (0 performance impact). You would also be able to schedule tests in CI/CD and invite more team members on the dashboard. For that, you should install Akto Enterprise edition available here. Read more about it here

API Security testing tutorials

Title	Link
Introduction	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFt4OVmfE2s
Tutorial 1: SSRF Port Scanning (OWASP API7:2023)	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjNNh6asAD0

Develop and contribute

Quicksetup using VSCode Devcontainers

Prerequisites:

Install VSCode
Install VSCode Dev Containers extension
Windows: Docker Desktop 2.0+ on Windows 10 Pro/Enterprise. Windows 10 Home (2004+) requires Docker Desktop 2.3+ and the WSL 2 back-end.
macOS: Docker Desktop 2.0+.
Linux: Docker CE/EE 18.06+ and Docker Compose 1.21+.

Note: If using Docker Desktop, consider changing the memory allocation to 8 GB for better performance

Steps:

Clone repo and open in vscode

Open terminal
mkdir ~/akto_code
cd ~/akto_code
git clone https://github.com/akto-api-security/akto
Open in VScode: code akto

Start Dev Container

Go to View > Command Palette and type: Dev Containers: Reopen in Container
Wait for the Dev Container to set up.
Open localhost:9090 in your web browser to see the Akto dashboard

Manual Setup Instructions

Prerequisites

OpenJDK 8, node(v18.7.0+ link), npm(v8.15.0+), maven (v3.6.3 link), MongoDB (v5.0.3+ link)

akto v2.13.6