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Optimise and Secure AWS HTTP API Gateway by locking down direct access

SkildOps
8 min readNov 17, 2023

Read this article for free: https://skildops.com/blog/optimise-and-secure-aws-http-api-gateway-by-locking-down-direct-access

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AWS HTTP API Gateway let’s you deploy RESTful API quickly in the most affordable way without compromising on basic security, performance, scalability and observability but unlike REST API Gateway lacks many advanced features such as WAF attachment, resource policy, API key management, caching, canary deployments, request body transformation, X-Ray tracing, etc.

AWS WAF is a vital resource to secure publicly exposed endpoints from various types of attacks and because HTTP API Gateway does not support WAF association natively, we need to create a CloudFront distribution and use it as an entry point to the HTTP API Gateway.

Even after implementing the above resources, we aren’t fully secure because if a bad actor can discover our HTTP API Gateway URL, they can bypass WAF and our API becomes highly vulnerable to attacks. Hence, in this article we will learn how to lock down direct access to HTTP API Gateway URL. The implementation is very simple and straightforward so let’s get started.

HTTP API Gateway

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SkildOps
SkildOps

Written by SkildOps

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