How would I protect a private API

Question

I am working on a REST API to be used by a mobile application I am writing, mostly for the purpose of communicating with a database.

The mobile application makes calls to URLs like this:

example.com/mobileapi/getinfo

And carries certain POST payload along with each call.

I'm not worried about user authentication etc.

However, what I am worried about is, if someone were to use the mobile application along with a network monitoring tool like Fiddler or Wireshark, they could document all the URLs being called, along with all the POST parameters. That would be enough information to create their own app that uses my API.

How can I prevent this? I considered hardcoding a Key into my application and have that included as a POST parameter with each request, but that would be visible as well.

Answer 1

What you want to do is employ mutually-authenticated SSL, so that your server will only accept incoming connections from your app and your app will only communicate with your server.

Here's the high-level approach. Create a self-signed server SSL certificate and deploy on your web server. If you're using Android, you can use the keytool included with the Android SDK for this purpose; if you're using another app platform, similar tools exist for them as well. Then create a self-signed client and deploy that within your application in a custom keystore included in your application as a resource (keytool will generate this as well). Configure the server to require client-side SSL authentication and to only accept the client certificate you generated. Configure the client to use that client-side certificate to identify itself and only accept the one server-side certificate you installed on your server for that part of it.

If someone/something other than your app attempts to connect to your server, the SSL connection will not be created, as the server will reject incoming SSL connections that do not present the client certificate that you have included in your app.

A step-by-step for this is a much longer answer than is warranted here. I would suggest doing this in stages as there are resources on the web about how to deal with self-signed SSL certificate in Android (I'm not as familiar with how to do this on other mobile platforms), both server and client side. There is also a complete walk-through in my book, Application Security for the Android Platform, published by O'Reilly.