Currently, AWS API Gateway provides a mechanism for setting up Usage Plans, associations with API keys, and quota limitations for each plan or more fine-grained limits for methods. But this quota is "hard", i.e. it will restrict further API access with HTTP 429 if reached. Is there any recommended way to configure "soft" quotas – for instance, how can one just monitor events caused such limitation exceeding?
As I understand, there is nothing to with API Gateway's custom gateway responses, as they are bound to HTTP 4XX and 5XX error status codes. According to underlying idea, reaching "soft" limit is not considered as an error and API access should be still enabled.
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For those requests excess the limit and get the response: 429 too many requests, will those requests still charge me?
In this question,t he throttling limit is the limit from the API gateway itself, no other limit.
It depends.
If you reached the limit for your usage plan and the API Gateway throttles you, there would be no additional costs. Although, this kind of throttling may not be as accurate as you would expect, see this question: AWS API Gateway Throttling not working as expected.
If your backend integration throws a 429 (for example, you reached some kind of Lambda limit), than your request will be charged on the API Gateway.
I'm building a serverless application with AWS Lambda and API Gateway. In order to prevent DDOS attacks doing a large number of requests costing me lots of money, I've set up a usage plan with a request quota (e.g. 10K requests/month). This requires an API key to be passed as header by callers.
This seemingly works well, but I also need to enable CORS for this service. For that I need to allow for an unauthorized OPTIONS request ("CORS preflight" request) as browsers don't support sending any special header there. But then I can't seem to find a way for enforcing a quota and I'm back to square one: an uncontrolled number of those requests could cost an unforeseeable amount of money. Is there any way to exclude this possibility?
To enforce a quota on OPTIONS requests, create a web ACL in AWS WAF & associate it to a stage of your API in API Gateway. Add a rate-based rule in the web ACL that blocks all OPTIONS requests beyond the rate limit you specify. Rules in web ACLs can be configured specifically for this, as shown below:
For a screenshot-guided tutorial of this entire process, see my blog post.
You are not paying for any unauthorized calls to API-Gateway.
AWS is picking up this charge.
You are paying after the request is authorized and only if it does not exceed your usage plan.
So if somebody is doing a DDOS on your API without authentication it is free of charge.
If somebody is doing a DDOS with a valid api key you will only pay until your usage plan is exceeded.
Find more information here.
Requests are not charged for authorization and authentication
failures.
Calls to methods that require API keys are not charged when API keys
are missing or invalid.
API Gateway-throttled requests are not charged when the request rate
or burst rate exceeds the preconfigured limits.
Usage plan-throttled requests are not charged when rate limits or
quota exceed the preconfigured limits.
So make sure to have authentication enabled on your API and a usage plan in place for all the authenticated requests.
If I create a public endpoint using AWS API Gateway, the entire world could access it. This would be a problem because the end point would trigger an AWS Lambda function. If we assume that I can't query a data source to determine the frequency that the incoming IP address queried the resource in the past, what would be the best practice for protecting this end point from abuse? Do I have any other security options?
I realize I could use a reCaptcha but this would still invoke the AWS Lambda function and would incur costs if done a million times over a short window of time.
A very simple way of protecting your API gateway
Use AWS Cloudfront with TTL 0 and pass custom headers from AWS Cloudfront to API gateway
Use AWS WAF with AWS Cloudfront
AWS API Gateway also handles some basic level of DDOS attacks.
Kindly also view these blogs for securing AWS API Gateway
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/protecting-your-api-using-amazon-api-gateway-and-aws-waf-part-i/
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/protecting-your-api-using-amazon-api-gateway-and-aws-waf-part-2/
You are probably looking for throttling limit configuration or usage plan definition:
To prevent your API from being overwhelmed by too many requests,
Amazon API Gateway throttles requests to your API using the token
bucket algorithm, where a token counts for a request. Specifically,
API Gateway sets a limit on a steady-state rate and a burst of request
submissions against all APIs in your account. In the token bucket
algorithm, the burst is the maximum bucket size.
When request submissions exceed the steady-state request rate and
burst limits, API Gateway fails the limit-exceeding requests and
returns 429 Too Many Requests error responses to the client. Upon
catching such exceptions, the client can resubmit the failed requests
in a rate-limiting fashion, while complying with the API Gateway
throttling limits.
As an API developer, you can set the limits for individual API stages
or methods to improve overall performance across all APIs in your
account. Alternatively, you can enable usage plans to restrict client
request submissions to within specified request rates and quotas. This
restricts the overall request submissions so that they don't go
significantly past the account-level throttling limits.
References:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/api-gateway-request-throttling.html
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/api-gateway-create-usage-plans-with-console.html#api-gateway-usage-plan-create
I am creating a publicly available API using API Gateway which is backed with lambda functions to do some processing. I have secured it with a custom security header that implements hmac authentication with timestamp to protect against replay attacks.
I understand that API Gateway protects against DDOS attacks through its high availability, but any invalid requests will still be passed to the lambda authentication function. So, I guess an attacker can submit invalid unauthenticated requests resulting in high costs. It will take a considerable number of requests to cause damage but it is still very doable. What is the best way to protect against that ?
Thank you
To prevent DDoS and higher rate of access, you can setup WAF. Have a look at this link, to get a deeper understanding how to setup WAF with API Gateway.
API Gateway will not charge you for unauthenticated requests, however you would be charged by Lambda for the invocation on the authorizer.
API Gateway offers a semi-useful mitigation to this problem in the form of the 'identity validation expression' on the Authorizer, which is just a regex that is matched against the incoming identity source header.
Besides that, you might want to just implement some kind of negative cache or validation yourself in the Authorizer function to minimize the billed milliseconds.
I would like to have a policy on an API Gateway that would throttle requests based on a header value. For example, header value "AAA" would be allowed up to 10 requests per day, "BBB", 20 requests. Is this possible? How can I achieve this? Note: I am trying to avoid writing a lambda function for this purpose, because then I would need to keep state, etc.
API Gateway has Usage Plans, which support what you are attempting to do.
Each usage plan can have a throttling limit, which restricts requests per second and burst rate. Usage plans can also have quotas, which would allow you to add limits on requests per day.
API Gateway allows you to add API Keys to a usage plan. API Keys are sent HTTP header (x-api-key).
You can find more details in the Usage Plans for API Gateway launch blog and API Gateway Usage Plan docs.