Protecting Sensitive Data in Frontend Development

Understanding API Types

As frontend developers, we know that managing secrets and credentials is crucial to preventing unauthorized access and potential security breaches. There are two types of APIs: private and public.

• Private APIs: Developed and hosted in-house, not shared or used by external developers. Since private APIs are restricted, there’s no need to include a key or secret before using the API.
• Public APIs: Services offered by third-party providers, available for all developers to use. Examples include Google Maps and weather APIs.

The Risks of Exposed Secrets

If API keys and credential secrets are not properly stored, they can cause:

• Financial damage
• Regulatory damage
• Reputational damage
• Unauthorized access
• Exceeding usage limits
• Loss of control over resources
• Hackers gaining access to sensitive data, violating API provider terms of use

Bad Practices to Avoid

Some common mistakes to avoid:

• Embedding credential secrets directly in code: Makes it easy for hackers to extract the secret using browser dev tools.
• Uploading codebases to Git or GitHub with secrets directly in the code: Anyone can access the repository online.
• Not setting restrictions on API keys or secrets: Can lead to unauthorized usage.

Good Practices to Follow

To secure your API keys and secrets:

• Set restrictions on API keys: Some service providers allow you to set limits on the number of requests per day and specify the URL from which the API can be accessed.
• Conceal keys in an environment variable (.env) file: Keeps secrets out of code and prevents them from being committed to GitHub.
• Use secret scanning solutions: Services like GitGuardian can scan Git commits to detect and capture secrets that were accidentally committed.

# Example of setting environment variables in a.env file
API_KEY=your_secret_api_key
API_URL=https://api.example.com

Additional Security Measures

To further secure your API keys and secrets:

• Do not share GitHub credentials with anyone outside of your development team.
• Revoke access for developers who no longer work on your team.
• Use secret scanning services to scan your repositories: Provides an extra layer of security.

Learn more about securing API keys and secrets.