Cequence Security API Sentinel

Short Summary

APIs have shifted from a developer-only construct to a core foundation of the digital economy, enabling data exchange across vendors, suppliers, customers, cloud infrastructures, and smart-device networks while unlocking new business models. Because APIs now directly affect operational efficiency, scalability, agility, and profitability, underestimating API-specific security risks creates material business exposure. Traditional security controls such as web application firewalls or intrusion detection systems are often assumed to be sufficient, yet high-profile incidents at large enterprises demonstrate that API threats require dedicated approaches.

Effective API protection must span the full lifecycle, beginning with secure design and extending through operational controls such as encryption, firewalling, DLP, authentication, fine-grained access control, integrity protections, monitoring, and analytics. A foundational requirement is discovery: without a continuously maintained, real-time inventory, classification, and risk assessment of both known and unknown APIs, consistent protection is unattainable. Given alert fatigue and evolving threats, modern API security must also detect unknown suspicious activity, quantify risk, and provide actionable (ideally automated) mitigation guidance.

Cequence Security, founded in 2015 in Sunnyvale by veterans from Palo Alto Networks and Symantec, delivers a unified, ML-based, cloud-native, containerized Application Security Platform. Its API Sentinel product specializes in real-time API discovery, usage analysis, OpenAPI schema drift detection, and multi-metric risk scoring across three core risk categories: schema non-conformance, sensitive data exposure, and insecure access controls. Deployed via inline proxies or passive taps and integrated with CDNs and infrastructure components (gateways, proxies, ingress controllers, load balancers), it supports both edge and microservice-oriented monitoring. It offers dashboards, tagging/grouping, anomaly detection, 180+ prebuilt rules, custom scripting, integrations to SIEM/SOC and third-party controls, and achieves strongest mitigation when paired with Cequence App Firewall and Bot Defense.

Interesting Facts

• APIs enable communication with suppliers, service providers, and customers and facilitate seamless data exchange between applications from different vendors.
• APIs orchestrate massive cloud infrastructures and global networks of smart devices.
• API-related cyberattacks and data breaches have affected large enterprises including Facebook and Tesla.
• Continuous real-time monitoring is required to keep API inventories aligned with changing IT landscapes and emerging threats.
• Cequence Security is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
• Cequence Security was founded in 2015 by security industry veterans previously from Palo Alto Networks and Symantec.
• The Cequence Application Security Platform is cloud-native and fully containerized, supporting on-premises, public cloud, and SaaS deployments.
• CQAI is a patented machine learning-based analytics engine that processes transactional data collected by platform sensors.
• API Sentinel includes over 180 pre-defined rules available out of the box.
• API Sentinel’s built-in API risk categories include schema non-conformance, sensitive data exposure, and insecure access controls.

Notable Quotes

• “APIs are no longer just an IT thing – they have a strong impact on nearly every business's operational efficiency, scalability, and agility and in the end, directly influence its profitability.”
• “A proper, well-planned strategy for protecting various internal and external, own and 3rd-party APIs must address every step along the API lifecycle.”
• “Without a full inventory, classification, and risk assessment of all known and unknown APIs, consistent protection is simply impossible.”
• “Continuous real-time monitoring is needed to reflect the ever-changing IT landscapes and new types of threats that emerge constantly.”
• “The core technology that powers the Cequence platform is CQAI – a patented machine learning-based analytics engine.”
• “By maintaining behavior profiles of each application or API, the platform can then analyze each transaction to identify not just known malicious actions, but anomalies and other suspicious activities as well.”
• “Schema non-conformance is one of the three API risk categories built into the platform, the other two being sensitive data exposure and insecure access controls.”
• “APIs with schema violations or without attached specifications (in other words, unmanaged ‘shadow APIs’) have an especially high risk associated with them.”
• “Policy management is defined as an ability for users to combine detection rules with mitigation actions that can be applied to all APIs or certain endpoints or groups.”
• “When deployed together, the products provide a unified management console with consolidated analytics across the full range of security findings.”