• Sep 30, 2018 Best practices for building secure API Keys API Key Generation. Since the API key itself is an identity by which to identify. Secure API Key Storage. Since the API key provides direct access to data. Presenting the API Key to users. Since we don’t store the original API key.
• To keep your API keys secure, follow these best practices: Do not embed API keys directly in code: API keys that are embedded in code can be accidentally. Do not store API keys in files inside your application's source tree: If you store API keys in. Restrict your API keys to be used by only.
• Aug 30, 2018  Built on the shoulders of over 5 million developers, let’s review some best practices for documenting your API.
• Mar 01, 2018 For user authorization, JWT (JSON Web Token) with OAuth2 provides a way to achieve this. Additionally, for service-to-service communication, try to have the encrypted API-key passed in the header.

• Api Development Best Practices
• Api Key Generator

Key Vault allows you to securely access sensitive information from within your applications:

This article describes how to manage and generate required API keys used to authenticate with the Tealium API. In this article: Table of Contents Placeholder Prerequisites To generate or interact with your own key, you must first be authorized by another user with the Manage Users permission.

• Keys and secrets are protected without having to write the code yourself and you are easily able to use them from your applications.
• You are able to have your customers own and manage their own keys so you can concentrate on providing the core software features. In this way, your applications will not own the responsibility or potential liability for your customers' tenant keys and secrets.
• Your application can use keys for signing and encryption yet keeps the key management external from your application, allowing your solution to be suitable as a geographically distributed app.
• Manage Key Vault certificates. For more information, see Certificates

For more general information on Azure Key Vault, see What is Key Vault).

Public Previews

Dll fixer free license key. Periodically, we release a public preview of a new Key Vault feature. Try out these and let us know what you think via azurekeyvault@microsoft.com, our feedback email address.

Creating and Managing Key Vaults

Azure Key Vault provides a way to securely store credentials and other keys and secrets, but your code needs to authenticate to Key Vault to retrieve them. Managed identities for Azure resources makes solving this problem simpler by giving Azure services an automatically managed identity in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). You can use this identity to authenticate to any service that supports Azure AD authentication, including Key Vault, without having any credentials in your code.

For more information on managed identities for Azure resources, see the managed identities overview. For more information on working with Azure AD, see Integrating applications with Azure Active Directory.

Before working with keys, secrets or certificates in your key vault, you'll create and manage your key vault through CLI, PowerShell, Resource Manager Templates or REST, as described in the following articles:

Coding with Key Vault

The Key Vault management system for programmers consists of several interfaces. This section contains links to all of the languages as well as some code examples.

Supported programming and scripting languages

REST

All of your Key Vault resources are accessible through the REST interface; vaults, keys, secrets, etc.

Key Vault REST API Reference.

.NET

.NET API reference for Key Vault.

For more information on the 2.x version of the .NET SDK, see the Release notes.

Java

Node.js

In Node.js, the Key Vault management API and the Key Vault object API are separate. The following overview article gives you access to both.

Python

Azure CLI

Azure PowerShell

Code examples

For complete examples using Key Vault with your applications, see:

• Azure Key Vault code samples - Code Samples for Azure Key Vault.
• Use Azure Key Vault from a Web Application - tutorial to help you learn how to use Azure Key Vault from a web application in Azure.

How-tos

The following articles and scenarios provide task-specific guidance for working with Azure Key Vault:

• Change key vault tenant ID after subscription move - When you move your Azure subscription from tenant A to tenant B, your existing key vaults are inaccessible by the principals (users and applications) in tenant B. Fix this using this guide.
• Accessing Key Vault behind firewall - To access a key vault your key vault client application needs to be able to access multiple end-points for various functionalities.
• How to Generate and Transfer HSM-Protected Keys for Azure Key Vault - This will help you plan for, generate and then transfer your own HSM-protected keys to use with Azure Key Vault.
• How to pass secure values (such as passwords) during deployment - When you need to pass a secure value (like a password) as a parameter during deployment, you can store that value as a secret in an Azure Key Vault and reference the value in other Resource Manager templates.
• How to use Key Vault for extensible key management with SQL Server - The SQL Server Connector for Azure Key Vault enables SQL Server and SQL-in-a-VM to leverage the Azure Key Vault service as an Extensible Key Management (EKM) provider to protect its encryption keys for applications link; Transparent Data Encryption, Backup Encryption, and Column Level Encryption.
• How to deploy Certificates to VMs from Key Vault - A cloud application running in a VM on Azure needs a certificate. How do you get this certificate into this VM today?
• How to set up Key Vault with end to end key rotation and auditing - This walks through how to set up key rotation and auditing with Azure Key Vault.
• Deploying Azure Web App Certificate through Key Vault provides step-by-step instructions for deploying certificates stored in Key Vault as part of App Service Certificate offering.
• Grant permission to many applications to access a key vault Key Vault access control policy supports up to 1024 entries. However you can create an Azure Active Directory security group. Add all the associated service principals to this security group and then grant access to this security group to Key Vault.
• For more task-specific guidance on integrating and using Key Vaults with Azure, see Ryan Jones' Azure Resource Manager template examples for Key Vault.
• How to use Key Vault soft-delete with CLI guides you through the use and lifecycle of a key vault and various key vault objects with soft-delete enabled.
• How to use Key Vault soft-delete with PowerShell guides you through the use and lifecycle of a key vault and various key vault objects with soft-delete enabled.

Integrated with Key Vault

These articles are about other scenarios and services that use or integrate with Key Vault.

• Azure Disk Encryption leverages the industry standard BitLocker feature of Windows and the DM-Crypt feature of Linux to provide volume encryption for the OS and the data disks. The solution is integrated with Azure Key Vault to help you control and manage the disk encryption keys and secrets in your key vault subscription, while ensuring that all data in the virtual machine disks are encrypted at rest in your Azure storage.
• Azure Data Lake Store provides option for encryption of data that is stored in the account. For key management, Data Lake Store provides two modes for managing your master encryption keys (MEKs), which are required for decrypting any data that is stored in the Data Lake Store. You can either let Data Lake Store manage the MEKs for you, or choose to retain ownership of the MEKs using your Azure Key Vault account. You specify the mode of key management while creating a Data Lake Store account.
• Azure Information Protection allows you to manager your own tenant key. For example, instead of Microsoft managing your tenant key (the default), you can manage your own tenant key to comply with specific regulations that apply to your organization. Managing your own tenant key is also referred to as bring your own key, or BYOK.

Key Vault overviews and concepts

• Key Vault soft-delete behavior) describes a feature that allows recovery of deleted objects, whether the deletion was accidental or intentional.
• Key Vault client throttling orients you to the basic concepts of throttling and offers an approach for your app.
• Key Vault storage account keys overview) describes the Key Vault integration Azure Storage Accounts keys.
• Key Vault security worlds describes the relationships between regions and security areas.

Social

Supporting Libraries

• Microsoft Azure Key Vault Core Library provides IKey and IKeyResolver interfaces for locating keys from identifiers and performing operations with keys.
• Microsoft Azure Key Vault Extensions provides extended capabilities for Azure Key Vault.

The current internet ecosystem has literally been invaded by APIs, and for good reasons. By using third party APIs in your products or services, you have access to a ton of useful features — such as authentication or storage services — that can benefit both you and your users. By exposing your own API, your application becomes “part of the mix” and will be used in ways you’ve never thought before… if you do it the right way, obviously.

In this two part series I’ll show you how to create a RESTful API layer for your PHP applications, using a collection of real world best practices.

The full source code of this project will be available at the end of part 2.

REST: A pleasant UI for developers

First of all, an API is a user interface for developers, so it must be friendly, simple, easy to use and of course pleasant; or else it will end up being another piece of digital junk out there.

Documentation, even in the form of a simple but well written README file, is a good place to start. The minimal information we need is a summary of the service’s scope and the list of methods and access points.

A good summary can be:

Our application is a simple contact list service that manages contacts with linked notes. It has two object types, contacts and notes. Each contact has basic attributes such as first name, last name, and email address. Also, each contact can have a number of markdown-formatted notes linked to it.

Then, it’s a good idea to make a list of all the resources and actions that we are going to implement. This can be seen as the equivalent of wireframing for visual applications. Following the key principles of REST, each resource is represented by a URL, where the action is the HTTP method used to access it.

For example GET /api/contacts/12 retrieves the contact with id of 12, while PUT /api/contacts/12 will update that same contact.

The full list of methods is displayed below:

For a more complete and professional documentation, you may consider some tools like Swagger, apiDoc or Google APIs Discovery Service: your users will love you!

Tools and setup

The main tool I’m going to use to build our API is Slim Framework. Why?

[It] helps you quickly write simple yet powerful web applications and APIs.

And that’s true. Its powerful routing feature makes it easy to use methods other than the standard GET and POST, it provides built-in support for HTTP method overridess (via both HTTP header and hidden POST fields) and it can be hooked with middleware and extra features to make apps and API development really easy.

Along with Slim I’m using Idiorm to access the database layer and Monolog for logging. So our composer.json file will look like this:

The slim/extras and slim/middleware packages provide useful features such as content type parsing and basic authentication. Our custom classes are under the namespace of API and sit inside the lib directory.

At this point our working directory structure would look like this:

The front controller of our application is public/index.php, where all the non-file-or-directory traffic is redirected via standard URL rewrite rules.

I’ve then placed all the initialization code in bootstrap.php which we’ll see later. The share directory contains data such as logs, configuration files, the SQLite databases and dump files, and the SSL certificates. The bin directory contains utility scripts that create the database and import some data using the provided .sql files.

SSL Everywhere

Our API will be accessible only in HTTPS mode, with no redirection. This simplifies the authentication logic and prevents poorly configured clients to access non encrypted endpoints. The easiest and more logical way to set this up is acting directly on the web server or through a proxy server.

I’m using old trusted Apache to do this, and my the virtual host file looks like this:

Directory settings are defined first, so that they are in common with both the HTTP and HTTPS version of our site. In the non-secure host configuration I’m using mod_rewrite to issue a 403 Forbidden error for any non secure connection, then in the secure section I’m setting up SSL using my self-signed certificates, along with the SLIM_ENV variable that tells Slim the current application mode.

For more information on how to create a self signed certificate an install it on your Apache see this article on SSLShopper.

Now that we have clear objectives, a basic directory structure, and a server setup, let’s run a composer.phar install and start writing some code.

Bootstrap and Front Controller

As said before, the bootstrap.php file is responsible for loading our application settings and autoloader setup.

First I get the current environment. If a file named <EnvName>.php is present it’s loaded, if not the default config file is loaded. Slim specific settings are stored in the $config['app'] array and passed to the constructor of our application that extends the basic Slim object (optional but recommended).

How to get free CSGO skins? Free CSGO Case Opener. The first thing you need to do is choose a CSGO case. It can be any case as all of the cases are free on our website. Once you click on “Open for free”, click on the open case button which will start the spinning of components of the case. Key free steam. Download now CSGO – FREE UNLIMITED CASE KEY GENERATOR (Undetected) Has built in Proxy and VPN support, this tool will make you 100% anonymous. CSGO – FREE UNLIMITED CASE KEY GENERATOR (Undetected) file is 100% clean and safe, no hidden ads or offers, we use only open source technologies, full code is available for you to edit or upate. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive License Activation Key generator! Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Keygen is here and it is FREE and 100% working and legit. Before our system send cd key, you will need to pass this human verification step.

For example the statement:

configures a Monolog logger that writes to a file at app/path/share/logs/EnvName_YYYY-mm-dd.log.

Then, after some refinements (you can see them in the source), I get the generated log writer and try to connect to the database:

Lastly I add the needed middleware to my application instance. Slim’s middleware is like the layers of an onion, the first middleware you add will be the innermost layer, so the order of our middleware is important. I’m using the following middleware in our API:

• Cache (the innermost);
• ContentTypes: parses JSON-formatted body from the client;
• RateLimit: manages users API limits;
• JSON: utility middleware for “JSON only responses” and “JSON encoded bodies” best practices;
• Authentication (outermost).

We will write all these except for the pre-existing ContentTypes.

At the end of the bootstrap file I’ve defined the two global variables $app (the application instance) and $log (the log writer). The file is loaded by our front controller index.php where the magic happens.

Routing structure

Slim has a nice feature called Route Groups. With this feature we can define our application routes like this:

I’ve created two nested groups, /api and /v1, so we can easily adhere to the “versioning in the URL” best practice. I’ve also created some optional routes for /api/, that could contain user-readable content, and a generic root URL (/) URL that in the real world could contain the public user interface for the app.

JSON middleware

My initial approach here was using a route middleware (another type of Slim’s middleware) inside the /v1 group for authentication and JSON requests/responses, but I’ve found it is more practical and clean to use classic middleware. As seen previously, a middleware is an instance of a class that inherits from SlimMiddleware. The call() method of a Slim middleware is where the action takes place, it’s executed automatically when the middleware is linked as global, with the $app->add() method.

Our JSON middleware achieves two best practices: “JSON only responses” and “JSON encoded bodies”. Here’s how:

We can pass a root path to our middleware constructor. In this case I’m passing /api/v1 so that our middleware is applied only on the API part of our site. If the current path matches the response content type header is forced to application/json, then I check the request method. If the request method is one of the write-enabled ones (PUT, POST, PATCH) the request content type header must be application/json, if not the application exits with a 415 Unsupported Media Type HTTP status code.

If all is right the statement $this->next->call() runs the next middleware in the chain.

Api Development Best Practices

Authentication

Since our application will run on HTTPS by default, I decided to use the token-over-basic-authentication approach: an API key is sent in the username field of the basic HTTP AUTH headers (no password required). In order to do this I wrote a Slim middleware class called TokenOverBasicAuth, by modifying the existing Slim HttpBasicAuth. This middleware is run first in the chain so it is added as last, and it takes an optional root path parameter in the constructor.

The method searches for the auth token within the PHP_AUTH_USER request header, if it does not exist or is invalid a 401 Forbidden status and authentication headers are passed to the client. The verify() method is protected so that it can be overridden by child classes; my version here is simple:

Here I’m simply checking for the presence of the API key in the users table, and If I find a valid user it’s added to the application context to be used with the next layer (RateLimit). You can modify or extend this class to inject your own authentication logic or use an OAuth module. For more info on OAuth see Jamie Munro’s article.

Consumable error payloads

Our API should show useful error messages in consumable format, if possible in JSON representation. We need a minimal payload that contains an error code and message. In addition, validation errors require more breakdown. With Slim we can redefine both 404 errors and server errors with the $app->notFound() and $app->error() method respectively.

Not found errors are simpler: first I’m grabbing the media type of the request, then the $isAPI flag tells me if the current URL is under the /api/v* group. If the client requested an API URL or sent a JSON content type header I’m returning a JSON output, else I can render a template or simply print some static HTML, as in this example.

Api Key Generator

Other errors are a little bit tricky, the $app->error() method is triggered when there is an exception and Slim transforms standard PHP errors in ErrorException objects. We need a way to give a useful error to the client without exposing too much of our internal mechanism in order to avoid security flaws. I’ve created two custom exceptions for this application, an APIException and an APIExceptionValidationException that are exposed to the public, all other exception types are logged, and displayed only in development mode.

The $app->error() method receives the thrown exception as argument. By default I fetch all the data I need and fill the $error array, then if I’m in production mode I unset the private data and rewrite the message with a generic one. The custom ValidationException class has a custom getData() method that returns an array of validation errors that are added to the final payload. Then the error is displayed in JSON or HTML depending on the request. On the API side we can have a simple error like this:

or a full validation error like this:

Conclusion

We have the core of our API in place now. In the next part we’ll add some flesh in order to have a full functioning service. In the meanwhile, feel free to read through the articles linked throughout this part – they’re a treasure trove of useful API design principles.