DEV Community: KOR Connect

Quickest Way to Secure API Keys on the Frontend (In Minutes)

KOR Connect — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 17:13:19 +0000

There are often times when we are building websites that leverage the benefits of being delivered on a CDN (security, performance, no backend infrastructure required), but we want more powerful, dynamic functionality. The best way to increase functionality is through APIs; i.e. email contact forms, processing of outside data, or present information like the weather forecast, flight schedules, currency exchange rates, etc. How would we make these API integrations quickly and securely if we do not want to build out a backend or add infrastructure to handle these API calls? Where do we secure the private API keys? What if we don't want user authentication prior to allowing our users to interact with the 3rd party APIs? The answer is KOR Connect, KOR Connect is a middleware platform that allows CDN front ends to secure API Keys in a quick and simple way, while automatically deploying security layers during the API integration process. The bonus is that it is also free to use!

We will talk through an example of integrating a Covid 19 tracker.

Let's create a COVID-19 tracker. In order to do this, we have to pick the API that we want to use. I decided on the COVID-19 Statistics API that uses data from John Hopkins University.

If you already have a KOR Connect account you can sign in here or you can create a new account.
Let’s start by creating an API connection on KOR Connect by clicking on the “+ Connect API” button:

The connection details were all copied directly from RapidAPI. More information regarding the API connection module here.

Done! After making the connection, go to View Details for your new API connection.

Now you will see the Secure API and Public API key, both generated by KOR Connect. You can also adjust your per-user rate limit for your API calls at the top left of the screen (the default is 5 calls per second). In this example, we will be using the Single URL Security Type provided by KOR Connect.

If you want, here is a great video tutorial by Traversy Media walking you through building the site on Vue.js. (Here is the code for his COVID-19 tracker). Note: In the tutorial he uses a public API, we will use KOR Connect to easily integrate the private API into our site.

Now, all you have to do is grab the Secure URL and Public API Key provided by KOR Connect (refer to the image above) and use them to make an API request. Here's an example of the fetch request.

fetch("<YOUR-SECURE-URL>", {
    "method": "GET",
    "headers": {
        "x-rapidapi-key": "<YOUR-PUBLIC-API-KEY>"
    }
})
.then(response => {
    console.log(response);
})
.catch(err => {
    console.error(err);
});

That’s it, now you are ready to start testing/ using your API integration. KOR Connect automatically sets the Connection Mode to Testing. When you are ready to go to production make sure you remember to switch the Connection Mode to Production, this will activate security and remove localhost from the allowed domains (more information here).

It was as simple as that, now your API integration works without any additional libraries or configurations.

If you're interested in adding even more security through an attestation service, click here for additional instructions.

In case you are interested in what happens automatically on KOR Connect’s end after you make a connection. Bot controls are activated that inspect for miscellaneous bots, security-related bots, calls coming from automated browsers, black listed origins, and user agents that don’t seem to be coming from a browser; these calls are blocked if they don’t pass inspection. Furthermore, KOR Connect validates the access-control-allow-origin header from your allowed origins, as well as provides a per-user rate limiter that can block malicious actors abusing calls without causing any interruptions to other users.

Integrate APIs Without a Backend

KOR Connect — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 11:05:04 +0000

When we build websites and webapps that leverage the benefits of being delivered on the CDN (benefits include security, performance, infinite scaling, no backend infrastructure required) we will often run into limitations when we want more powerful, dynamic functionality. The best way to increase functionality is through the integration of APIs. APIs give our frontends near infinite possibilities; i.e. we can easily connect contact forms, process outside data, store information, or present information like the weather forecast, flight schedules, currency exchange rates etc. One of the key benefits of having our frontend on the CDN is not having to deal with building and maintaining backend infrastructure, but how do we integrate APIs securely and easily without a backend? Where do we secure the private API keys? What if we don't want user authentication prior to allowing our users to interact with a 3rd party API? We will go through the simplest way of connecting APIs with automated security using KOR Connect.

How quickly can this be done and what happens?

The answer is in a few quick minutes if the API you are integrating with has decent documentation, but why would you want to integrate with an API that doesn't anyways? KOR Connect does everything on the backend, and as the user we only have to copy-paste the KOR Connect public endpoint and the header into our code after entering the integrating API information into KOR Connect. Everything else is done on KOR Connect's end.

Here are some of the things that happen automatically on KOR Connects end after you make a connection; bot controls are activated that inspect for, miscellaneous bots, security related bots, calls coming from automated browsers, black listed origins, and user agents that don’t seem to be coming from a browser; these calls are blocked if they don’t pass inspection. Furthermore KOR Connect validates the access-control-allow-origin header from your allowed origins, and provides a per user rate limiter that can block malicious actors abusing calls without causing any interruptions to other users.

Now let’s walk through an example integrating 2 APIs into our frontend; a geolocation API and the Open Weather API.

KOR Connect Backendless Reactjs Application

We will be giving our ReactJS frontend the ability to allow users to enter any address and get the current weather conditions alongside other details such as the wind speed, humidity and temperature. The challenge is that we are going to be using two APIs; one to translate the address into latitude and longitude, and another API to give us the weather conditions for that location. We are providing this multi API integration as an example to show that you can integrate as many APIs as you would like into a single project. You can also quickly and easily integrate just one API as well, by following along.

This web app can be hosted on any CDN or static site service like S3, Gitlab pages, Netlify, etc.

The APIs
Head over to Rapid API and subscribe to Forward & Reverse Geocoding as well as the Open Weather Map. After subscribing you'll be able to see your API Key in the Code Snippets section of each API's endpoint tab. Save that API key as well as the URL.

KOR Connect
If you already have a KOR Connect account you can sign in or you can create a new account.

Now from the KOR Connect dashboard select the Connect API button and fill in the form for a new connection. The only fields you need to change from the following image are the API Key and the allowed domain (choose the domain you'll be hosting your app from). The API key is the one you stored in the previous step. Optionally you can add more domains and change the name of the connection.

Repeat the process for the Weather API connection, see the following image for more details.

With your connections created you are now able to enter each connection via View Details to retrieve each secure URL and header that you'll need to include in your code.

You can modify the per user rate limit for your API calls at the top left of the screen. The Default is 5 calls per second. This rate limiter controls the number of calls per second, per user; so if a malicious user is attempting to increase your costs or crash your API connection that user will be blocked without causing any interference with other users. More information regarding the rate limiter here.

The Secure URL that is generated acts similar to the API base URL, and the header is using a KOR Connect generated public API key, with these two ready, you are now able to test and use your connection. Notice the Connection Mode on the top right, you are currently on Testing which means you can access KOR Connect through localhost but once you switch to production this is blocked, read more about it in the Testing and Production Modes documentation.

There is no configuration, library or import required to use KOR Connect's Single URI feature so we can jump straight to the API calls.

Here's the geolocation Axios request example where you can replace < SECURE-URL > with your secure base URL generated by KOR Connect and add the parameters you would like to have. Furthermore you can replace < PUBLIC-API-KEY > with the KOR Connect provided public API key. Here is our code you can take a look at:

const fwdGeoLocation = (loc) => {  
    let location = [];
    let options = {
      method: 'GET',
      url:<SECURE-URL>,
      params: {q: loc, 'accept-language': 'en', polygon_threshold: '0.0'},
      headers: {      
        'x-api-key': '<PUBLIC-API-KEY>'
      }
    };  
    axios.request(options).then(function (response) {      
      location = [response.data[0].lat, response.data[0].lon];      
      getWeather(location[0], location[1])
    }).catch(function (error) {
      console.error(error);
    });
  }

Here is the weather API Axios request example, following the same format as above.

const getWeather = (lat, lon) => {
    let options = {
      method: 'GET',
      url: '<SECURE-URL>',
      params: {lon: lon, lat: lat},
      headers: {        
        'x-api-key': '<PUBLIC-API-KEY>'
      }
    };

    axios.request(options).then(function (response) {      
      setWeather(response.data.data[0]);
    }).catch(function (error) {
      console.error(error);
    });
  }

When the Geolocation API responds successful, it stores the result in state triggering React to render the weather information that is received. If you are interested in reviewing this implementation refer to this section of the code.

Done! You should now have your API Keys secured and integration working.

Note: One thing that you might have noticed is that we're posting the URL and API key for the world to see but this is one of the advantages of KOR Connect. The KOR Connect generated API Keys are public keys and not the Open Weather or Geolocation API Keys, and the same holds true for the URL, both values are delivered by KOR to secure and obscure the actual information you want to protect. For maintainability of your code, you might want to store KOR Connect's API key and secure URL into a .env file or as env variables depending on where you're hosting it.

Conclusion
Using KOR Connect saves a considerable amount of resources, both time and money. For an approach requiring a server, you would need to provision the infra, harden the server, add observability, keep it up to date and so on. It’s a real pain in the neck but it’s not the only option. The serverless approach is a smoother alternative, less expensive if the functions are not constantly active and easier to manage, the caveats are having to learn the vendor's serverless implementation and maintaining the runtime. With KOR Connect you can release your application once your front end is ready to go.

Best ways to Connect APIs on the frontend

KOR Connect — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 17:03:59 +0000

There are often times when we are building websites that leverage the benefits of being delivered on a CDN (security, performance, no backend infrastructure required), but we want more powerful, dynamic functionality. The best way to increase functionality is through APIs; i.e. email contact forms, processing of outside data, or present information like the weather forecast, flight schedules, currency exchange rates etc. How would we make these API integrations quickly and securely if we do not want to build out a backend or add infrastructure to handle these API calls? Where do we secure the private API keys? What if we don't want user authentication prior to allowing our users to interact with the 3rd party APIs? We will go over the best ways of executing these API integrations. Then we will provide links to some projects that walk you through how this is done via KOR Connect.

Ways of integrating 3rd party APIs without backend infrastructure:

Serverless Functions as a backend proxy (AWS Lambda):

It is often recommended to use serverless functions to hide API keys for client side applications. Then the client can use this serverless function as a proxy to call the API through a new endpoint. The developer should also incorporate CORS to identify the header origin so that only the allowed domains are calling the proxy (to prevent unwanted calls to the proxy url from anywhere). This may seem secure but CORS only verifies browser calls and can be easily spoofed or can be called from outside of the browser. A malicious actor can still run up costs with a bot and have the endpoint shut down. Further issues with this technique can arise around provisioning AWS services to support the lambda functions like API gateways, roles, and permissions between cloud services, this can be very time consuming if you are not familiar with the cloud provider.

Netlify Functions (built on AWS Lambda):

Netlify Functions is a wrapper around AWS Lambdas, the main advantage to using this approach over the AWS provisioned proxy is an improved user experience and Netlify helps streamline the deployment for you. Netlify Functions remove the tasks associated with setting up an AWS account and other AWS services required to correctly integrate the API. Similar security issues persist with Netlify Functions as they do with setting up your own AWS provisioned proxy. Even with CORS setup the new Netlify endpoint can be called in unwanted ways and by unwanted agents. This leaves your API susceptible to being shut down, or having costs run up. Furthermore if you are not familiar with writing functions this could present an additional learning curve.

KOR Connect:

KOR Connect is a new way for client-side web apps to integrate APIs. KOR Connect is the quickest way to secure API Keys and connect 3rd party APIs because you do not need to build infrastructure (AWS/ other cloud providers), or code functions (AWS and Netlify Functions). KOR Connect also uses AWS Lambda to secure API keys but the similarities between KOR Connect and the other options end there. The API key is secured on KOR Connect through a one click integration, then a public URL and header are generated by KOR Connect that is copy- pasted into the frontend code. This third party API integration process takes less than a minute for the developer to complete and automatically comes with a number of security features. These features include bot control which inspects for: miscellaneous bots, security related bots, calls coming from automated browsers, black listed origins, and user agents that don’t seem to be coming from a browser, and blocks these calls if they don’t pass inspection. As well as validates the access-control-allow-origin header from the developer’s allowed origins, and provides a per user rate limiter that can block malicious actors abusing calls without causing any interruptions to other users.

If the developer wants even more security after this simple single URL integration is completed KOR Connect offers a more robust origin validation and an attestation layer provided by Google’s Recaptcha. Depending on the framework that the developer is working with (e.g. Reactjs, Vue, Angular etc) the corresponding snippets of code that KOR Connect provides will need to be placed into the code of the project.

KOR Connect prevents endpoint calls from malicious actors with and without the browser, secures API keys, and blocks bot attacks. The public URL that is used in the code does not need to be hidden so this frees the developer from having to worry about API secrets ending up in the git repository, API secrets being exposed on the client, having to manually create wrappers around lambda functions, and worrying about unwanted endpoint calls being made. The current feature set offered by KOR Connect is the best option for client-side web apps that want dynamic functionality but may not necessarily want user authentication. (Bonus it’s also free)

Here are some tutorial links walking you through API integrations with KOR Connect:

Try them out!

Music Downloader API Integrated on the Frontend

Quickest way to Secure API Keys on the Frontend- Building a Vue.js Covid tracker.

Connecting a gif API on ReactJS without a backend

Realtime Currency Exchange API Integration - HTML