Is there a way to detect not documented REST WEB API - asp.net-web-api

Is there a way to scan website to detect not documented public/non-public web api methods?
I'm developing a tool where I use non public API, i.e. API protected by public/private key.
I suppose their documentation is not updated well and there are more methods than described in documentation.
I wondered whether it is possible to discover non documented api methods that might already exist.
p.s. I understand consequences of using non-documented api..

Related

Micro-service: How to provide an aggregated documentation?

Here is a simple use case to illustrate my question : imagine a bank mobile app, the features to implement are:
List the beneficiaries
Do a payment
We have one micro-service to handle the payments "PaymentService" and one to deal with the beneficiaries "BeneficiaryService". Both have a documented contract with RAML or OpenAPI.
I think it's not a good idea to let the mobile app call the two micro-services independently: it would expose too much the internal structure of the information system and provide no abstraction and so no mitigation.
So, we need to build a "facade" API that expose the routes of "PaymentService" + "BeneficiaryService" to ease the integration. Let's call it "MyAwesomeMobileApp"
I assume "MyAwesomeMobileApp" can be achieved by writing code (i.e. via an ESB or a dedicated Spring app) or via an API Gateway by configuration.
The thing is how do you provide aggregated documentation to your customer (the people coding the mobile app frontend) ?
By aggregated documentation I mean, a documentation with a set of routes from "PaymentService" and from "BeneficiaryService". A sort of third contract made with a subset of each micro-services.
Thank you
If you're providing (requiring) a gateway API between the application and the other services (which seems like a good choice in your example), you provide documentation only for the gateway API endpoints as the services it consumes are not relevant to the mobile app developer.
The way your facade implements communication with any services behind it could well be different than the services themselves (for example: hiding a field that is for internal use or using different field names) and, as such, the contract even for the service-specific models could well be different.
So, document the facade/gateway API well (and independently) and be on your way. It should internally have brokers or some other separation between the endpoints it exposes and the specific requirements of the services it consumes that allows them to be independently updated without too-tight coupling.
If you are looking for a simple concatenation of the contracts or in other words a "unified" public documentation that contains endpoints from both API specification documents/contracts, then you can give APIMatic's merging feature a try.
A detailed step-by-step walkthrough can be found here: https://docs.apimatic.io/manage-apis/api-merging/#merging-two-api-specifications---a-basic-example . However, in brief, the steps for your scenario can be:
Structure your API contracts in a root directory like shown in an example below:
dir\
payments\
openapi.json
beneficiary\
main.raml
APIMATIC-META.json
Here openapi.json and main.raml can be your OpenAPI and RAML contracts respectively.
A minimalistic APIMATIC-META.json configuration file can look like this to enable merging:
{
"MergeConfiguration": {
"MergedApiName": "My title",
"MergeApis": true
}
}
ZIP the directory, upload it and import it into the APIMatic Dashboard (You will need to sign up first).
Preview your public documentation by doing Generate > Proceed > Preview API Portal. Publish/host it as required.
If you are looking to automate the process, APIMatic has an API too: https://www.apimatic.io/docs/api#/http

Accessing the Conversations API in c#

I have been using the recommended API; https://github.com/Inumedia/SlackAPI however there is a problem, some channels created as public and then made private don't appear either as channels or groups. Supposedly the answer to this is to use the new Conversations API that allows access to all channels/groups through the same methods. The problem is that the c# api doesn't support this. Does anyone know any other c# api that does, or are there any plans this semi-official one will support it at any time soon?

Google geocoding API security

I am asking this question after extensively reading Google's recommended approach, but I do have a problem with all these approaches, let me explain the situation.
I use combination of geolocation and geocoding API to know the approximate state location and then display relevant content. The geolocation API needs to be called obviously from the browser to get appropriate geolocation of the user. Google provides HTTP Referrer based restriction for this API. I know someone can easily spoof the referrer and make calls with the same API key. I do not see a huge advantage even though Google recommends this.
On the other hand Google does not allow HTTP Referrer for geocoding API, but it does allow that for the MAPS JavaScript API. But again if you are not using Google maps then using that API is violation of Google's terms. Now google recommends to move the code that uses geocoding web services API to be on the back-end so that your key will be protected. But since ultimately I need to deliver the result to a front-end web application that is publicly accessible and I can only make a browser based Ajax call to first get the geolocation to feed to geocoding, I ultimately need to make an Ajax call to get my geocoding information. Then someone can easily just latch onto my end-point to piggy back on and call the geocoding API as much as they want. So for situations like this I want to know what is the ideal and secured way to deal with. May be there are other APIs that might be an ideal situation for this.
In my case, I am not doing any maps so it's all purely server-side to get latitudes, longitudes and driving distance between two points. This today from Google support which might help and if you're using maps, then the links may provide further insight.
Regarding API restrictions, please note that HTTP referrers will not
work on Geocoding API since HTTP referrers can only be used for client
side services. In other words, Geocoding is a web service API and
should only be used on server-side implementation. IP address
restrictions should be used for web service APIs. However, if you are
using the Geocoding API in a website, IP address restriction would not
work. Please check the suitable restrictions for each API in the
following link:
https://developers.google.com/maps/api-key-best-practices#api_key_table
To make this work, you should create a separate key and use the new
one in your Geocoding API request URL. You may add a restriction to
this key by using an "API restriction", and restrict it to Geocoding
API only. If you don't want to create another key, you may keep using
your current one but make sure to change your implementation and use
the client side Geocoding service from the Maps JavaScript API. In
that case, please refer to this documentation:
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/geocoding
Another suggestion would be to get a static IP address from your ISP,
especially if you are planning to use it on a public website. For
development purposes, a sound solution would be to get three separate
keys: one for the staging and tests, another for server-side requests
and a third one for client-side requests. That way, you are making
sure your API key is protected.

Is it possible to access the adwords API directly through javascript?

I would like to access the adwords API through a simple single page web application using javascript. I would like to dynamically stop and start some of my adwords campaigns.
I can't seem to find any documentation on the REST endpoints for the API - only documentation for the various libraries.
Is it possible to do this through javascript only?
The current Adwords API is a SOAP-based interface, so there are no REST endpoints to use. It's of course still possible to construct SOAP messages and call operations without using one of the provided libraries.
Having said that, the next evolution of the API (the "Google Ads API") will support both gRPC and JSON REST-based communication, which would probably fit your scenario better. It's not yet ready for production use, however.

Web Api 2 Help Pages & OAuth Endpoint

I'm using ASP.net Web API 2 via VS2013 to create a private API for a project. This is all working well, including the automatic Help functionality, with the exception of one thing:
The API is secured using OAuth 2.0 Resource Owner Flow and I want to include the "/Token" endpoint in the Help as without it there is a very important part of the API that is completely undocumented.
I can't see any way of doing this as it stands because the OAuth functionality is handled via the OAuthAuthorizationServerProvider class rather than a ApiController derived one, and hence it will never be included in the standard documentation.
Does anyone know anyway that I can add my own documentation to the standard Help functionality?
I've actually managed to find a workaround, albeit a nasty one: Because the OAuth functionality is handled further up the stack you can basically make a normal Action within a Controller which takes a "custom" object that conforms to the input expected by the actual OAuth endpoint. It will never be called because the OAuth endpoint handles the URI first, but it still shows up in the API Help.

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