Protect Public Restful APIs with API Gateway and oauth2.0

Hi zeeshan.

First of all you need to decide whether you are gonna use an API Gateway of type REST or HTTP. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/http-api-vs-rest.html.

This is because they provide different security mechanisms:

• Rest: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/apigateway-control-access-to-api.html
• Http: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/http-api-access-control.html

You can check the possibilities above, but in general, in terms of Oauth2 support you should look into Lambda Authorizer (max level of control), Cognito pools and JWT Authorizers.

Other security mechanisms to be taken into account are about adoption of WAF (Web Application Firewall). Even in that case, it will depend on Rest vs Http. In general, you can attach a WAF directly to an API GW of type REST, while for HTTP you can achieve only if you have CloudFront in front of the api (as edge-optimized api) or an Application Load balancer.

Finally you should consider different levels of protections and possibly Packet Inspection and/or Detection. See a reference here https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery/scaling-network-traffic-inspection-using-aws-gateway-load-balancer/ which leverages Gateway Load Balancers to perform IPS scanning for internet ingress traffic.

Hope it helps ;)