Topic starter
06/09/2026 5:18 pm
TL;DR: APIs now drive 83% of online traffic, and organizations using them have seen 12.7% higher market capitalization growth, but LEVO’s analysis shows the security burden has shifted to authenticated access, where over-scoped, long-lived, or misvalidated tokens can fuel BOLA and data exposure. Stateless token controls help, but only when paired with continuous validation, runtime visibility, and strict scope governance.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by LEVO: “What is Token Authentication”.
By the numbers:
- 83% of all online traffic involves API based services.
- Broken Object Level Authorization remains the most common API vulnerability, accounting for roughly 40% of observed API security incidents.
- The 2025 Postman State of the API Report found that more than half of developers deploy new APIs to production at least monthly.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when API tokens are valid but over-scoped?
A: A valid token does not guarantee correct entitlement.
Q: Why do valid API requests still create breach risk?
A: Valid API requests still create breach risk because authentication proves the caller is known, not that the caller is entitled to the specific object.
Q: How can security teams tell whether API risk controls are actually working?
A: Look for reduced abuse volume, fewer successful automated attacks, and clearer visibility into which non-human clients are making requests and why.
Practitioner guidance
- Tighten token scope at issuance Map each API token to a single business purpose, object set, and audience, then reject any request that falls outside that intended boundary.
- Validate issuer and audience on every hop Require gateway and backend services to verify which system issued the token and which service is allowed to accept it before processing the request.
- Shorten access token lifetime and govern refresh tokens separately Use short-lived access tokens for routine calls and treat refresh tokens as higher-risk credentials with stronger storage, rotation, and revocation rules.
Bottom line: API security has shifted from proving that callers are authenticated to proving that their tokens are constrained to the right object, audience, and workflow.
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06/09/2026 5:19 pm
Token scope is now the primary security boundary for API access: Authentication no longer answers the real question by itself, because most API abuse happens after identity has already been established. The decisive control is whether the token is constrained to the exact object, workflow, and audience it was meant for. That makes scope governance a business control, not just an implementation detail, and teams that treat it as static policy will miss how quickly access drifts in production.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Secrets management is a top five cybersecurity priority for only 33% of organisations, behind cloud security (45%), API security (42%), and endpoint security (36%), according to the 2024 State of Secrets Management Survey.
- 71% of organizations use third-party APIs, according to Gartner’s 2024 data.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What should teams do when APIs and machine tokens drive the access model?
A: Treat service tokens as governed non-human identities with owners, purpose limits, and lifecycle rules. The key is to align issuance, review, and revocation with the actual workload or integration, because machine access often outlives the context that created it. That closes the gap between technical authentication and business accountability.
👉 Read our full editorial: Token authentication now defines API access control and breach risk