Rate Limiting APIs: Prevent Abuse and Credential Stuffing
How rate limiting stops brute force and credential stuffing attacks, algorithms for token bucket and sliding window, and implementation tips.
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Tags: security, api, best-practices
Rate Limiting: Protect Your API From Abuse and Brute Force Without rate limiting, your API endpoints are open to brute force attacks (trying millions of passwords), enumeration attacks (harvesting user data), spam abuse (sending thousands of emails through your platform), and DDoS amplification. Rate limiting is the control that makes these attacks economically infeasible. This guide covers the main algorithms, implementation patterns, and the headers your clients expect. Why Rate Limiting Is Security-Critical Password brute force: Without rate limiting, an attacker can try thousands of passwords per second against your login endpoint. Even with bcrypt (which is slow), if you allow 1000 attempts per second, cracking an 8-character password is feasible. Credential stuffing: Attackers take…
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