Rate Limiting Without the Guessing: Engineering API Abuse Controls That Hold
Rate Limiting Without the Guessing: Engineering API Abuse Controls That Hold Rate limiting gets treated as a configuration checkbox. It is not. A limit that is set once and never revisited will either break real users or protect nothing. OWASP's 2023 API list moved this problem into the main body of the document. API4, Unrestricted Resource Consumption, covers request counts plus CPU, memory,…
The article "Rate Limiting Without the Guessing: Engineering API Abuse Controls That Hold" discusses the limitations and challenges of traditional rate limiting in API abuse controls. It emphasizes that rate limiting is not just a configuration checkbox, but a complex issue that should be approached with a nuanced understanding.
The article highlights that a single global requests-per-minute rule is not effective against different types of abuse, such as credential stuffing, enumeration, and economic abuse. It suggests that counting the right thing, like API keys or operation-cost keys, is more important than just setting a threshold. The article also stresses the importance of proving that the limit works by testing it with hostile patterns and building in checks for both synthetic bursts.
Finally, it discusses the appropriate placement of rate limiting enforcement, suggesting that it should be done at the edge for coarse limits, at the service level for per-subject and per-resource limits, and at the data layer for protecting expensive queries.
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