Top 5 Best Practices For Securing GraphQL APIs

As GraphQL is getting more widely used and it's implementations are getting popular than ever. It is important to know what things to be considered in designing or manaing GraphQL APS.

• GraphQL solves under-fetching and over-fetching problems by enabling consumers to fetch only required data.

  Use Depth Limiting

An attacker can use several levels of deep nesting to create complex cyclical queries. Queries like this are computationally expensive and may render your API unresponsive. Hence, make sure to use depth limiting.

Using Timeout

Depth limiting is not always practical, so another thing you can do is to set a time limit for the queries. If a query takes longer than expected or the time limit, a timeout will occur and reject it.

Set Rate Limiting

You can also restrict the number of queries allowed in a specific time window.

Perform Cost Analysis of Queries

As the name suggests, cost analysis estimates the cost of a query. It restricts a query if it is computationally costly. There are different ways to determine the query cost, and they depend on the API in question.

Implement Pagination

If you are fetching huge data, it is always good to use pagination. If we don't use, a query for all the resources in a big collection may slow down or crash your instance.