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Today launching an app for the global audience is a one-minute-job due to Google Cloud platform. All you need is a credit card or an account in a bank. It's the only platform which delivers steady business growth and attractive returns on investment. Corporations trust the platform with their data and users today due to the reliability and the security that it offers. The public cloud computing platform's flexibility has also made it a favorite of independent developers. It offers secure storage, a rich line-up of APIs, and friendly support. In addition to stunning storage and capable computing services, people in the industry admire the platform's ace analytics offering too. No business challenge is too tough if you are a Google Cloud customer and that is the reason corporations such as, Spotify, Twitter, PayPal, 20th Century Fox, and Target are proud customers of the platform.
Due to its popularity, its APIs are in use today in millions of apps. It is not possible for developers of software solutions to protect the API keys in all circumstances. Sometimes the solution architecture does not permit it and sometimes it's exposed due to financial reasons. If we consider the case of a chrome extension that uses a Google Cloud API and the API key is in the code somewhere, when a user downloads and installs it, he can go into the installation folder, search and find the key, and that's enough to give the IT executives restless nights. It also has the potential to bring down the shutters as the quota theft losses will far surpass the revenues. You need to put safeguards in place to prevent malicious actors from stealing quota. In this article, we are going to explain 3 steps that you can take to prevent large-scale quota theft when your API key is exposed in public.
First, you need to apply restrictions on the API key. To do that, visit the Credentials page in APIs & Services at console.cloud.google.com. Click on the API key and you will reach the API key page. In the Key restrictions, Application restrictions, you can add HTTP referrers, that is useful when the API endpoint is being called from a content script of a chrome extension that is loaded in pages of a particular site. In case you have a serverside app, you can also mention IP addresses or a range of IP addresses in CIDR notation. There is also the option to apply restrictions in the case of Android apps (package name and SHA-1 signing-certificate fingerprint) or iOS apps (bundle identifier).
The next step is applying API restrictions. You need to restrict the API key with only the API that will be used by your solution(s). It will drastically reduce the options of the malicious actors who intend to commit quota theft. For instance, if the API key by default can be used with Chrome Web Store API, Cloud Billing API, Cloud OS Login API, Cloud Vision API, Compute Engine API etc. and you restrict it to Cloud Billing API and Compute Engine API, then it will not be usable in calls to other APIs.
The 3rd and last step is designing a perfect quota theft prevention policy and ensuring the policy is enforced. For instance, you might design a policy that, when your security team receives a Stackdriver alert on no. of successful API calls in a span of a minute, they will check the no. of API calls in the last hour, the logs, decide if a quota theft is in progress and then take a course of action.
If you want to protect your Google Cloud API based solution from large-scale quota theft, feel free to contact A Joshing Moth, a corporation that has deep expertise in design and enforcement of innovative quota theft prevention policies at affordable prices.
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