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API Shield
How it works
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Use cases
Global, integrated API protection and monitoring
Powered by 330 locations on our global network, API Shield automatically discovers, validates, and protects your API endpoints.
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Continuously discover your public API endpoints and their schemas with machine learning models and heuristics.
Stop common API attacks, including zero-day exploits, authentication abuse, data loss, DDoS, and other business logic attacks.
Validate incoming requests against schemas, authentication, and legitimate API business logic — and reduce your API hosting costs.
Built on our global, Internet-native network, API Shield automatically discovers, secures, and monitors API endpoints across your entire landscape — without slowing business innovation.
It consolidates application and API inventory, policy management, analytics, and reporting on a single platform, with the same connectivity and security benefits offered by Cloudflare’s web application services.
ANALYST RECOGNITION
Cloudflare was recognized as a Representative Vendor in the Gartner Market Guide for WAAP.
Top API Shield use cases
Document every public API in your landscape, even those that are unmanaged or unsecured.
Stop data leaks by continuously scanning response payloads for sensitive data.
Protect APIs by only accepting traffic that conforms to your OpenAPI schemas — while blocking malformed requests and HTTP anomalies.
Product brief
Solution brief
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Cloudflare API Shield is a security product designed to monitor your APIs and protect them from threats and misuse. It operates on Cloudflare's global network to automatically discover and secure your API endpoints, helping to prevent attacks and data loss.
API Shield blocks common API attacks, including OWASP Top 10 API Security risks. It accomplishes this by using a positive security model to ensure all API traffic conforms to your schemas. API Shield also identifies shadow APIs and unsecured APIs.
API Shield is designed to prevent data exfiltration by continuously scanning response payloads to identify and block sensitive information.
Cloudflare API Shield uses machine learning and heuristics to analyze traffic and identify all API endpoints in use, even those that are undocumented.
API Shield only allows API traffic that strictly follows the rules defined in your OpenAPI schemas, effectively blocking any request that deviates from the expected structure or content.