API Economy: Managing Security and Compliance Risks at Academia

#API #Security

Application Programing Interfaces (APIs) have transformed our digital world by connecting data, processes, and people. There are thousands of Open APIs publicly available for creating innovative applications dealing with Public Services, Health Sciences, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Social Media, and many others contributing to the Digital Economy. Researchers and students in academia are increasingly using Open APIs for various research/training related digital services and other academic purposes.  

Open APIs offer great benefits, but they come with security and legal risks. Unfortunately, not everyone (especially students) are aware of the underlying security and compliance challenges. Furthermore, there are no easily accessible repositories that provide security/legal assessments on these publicly available APIs. Existing repositories such as ProgrammableWeb, API.io, RapidAPI.com, APIs.guru and others are best at providing API endpoints, categories, and other information, which are not sufficient to address the security and legal concerns. 

In this presentation, speaker will discuss about the state of Open APIs from design and security perspectives that have been assessed by analyzing thousands of Open APIs from hundreds of vendors. Speaker will also talk about legal risks that should be avoided while using Open APIs. Overall, audience will learn about how to: (1) take advantage of the myriad of Open APIs; (2) accelerate research and product development; (3) meet compliance regulations; (4) reduce security/legal/privacy risks to make data-driven applications more INNOVATIVE (through Open APIs) yet SECURE (from cyber-attacks) and COMPLIANT (with Canadian privacy laws, GDPR, EU-US Privacy Shield, and other regulations)