Tejas Prasad’s Post

Cascading Effects of Repackaged APIs: Research on a security surface most AppSec conversations miss. Most API security work focuses on a single provider–consumer relationship. But what happens when a service (Web1) buys legitimate bulk access to a Parent API and resells it downstream to Web2, Web3, etc.? My paper maps what breaks in that chain: → Compounding latency -- each hop re-serializes the payload; a 3-hop chain can add 40-50%+ delay over a direct connection → The Auditability Vacuum -- Provider A only sees Web1's traffic fingerprint, masking thousands of end users and defeating IP/behavioral bans → Middleware Risk -- each layer injecting its own system prompts/headers can mutate requests enough to bypass content filters or cause hallucinated outputs blamed on the original provider → The CFAA gray zone -- Web1 uses valid credentials, so this is a ToS breach, not a CFAA violation, leaving providers stuck with slow civil litigation. I propose a zero-trust mitigation: recursive JWT signatures binding each layer's identity, so Provider A can reject any request missing a verifiable signature chain, plus behavioral fingerprinting (request burstiness, timing patterns) as a backstop. Read the full paper here: https://lnkd.in/dPx8aCv9 Shoutout to Corey J. Ball and APIsec for their work advancing API security research! Would love to hear thoughts and feedback from the AppSec and vulnerability research community. #Cybersecurity #APISecurity #AppSec #CloudSecurity #InformationSecurity #VulnerabilityResearch