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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.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by LEVO: token authentication for modern APIs
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.
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when API tokens are valid but over-scoped?
A: A valid token does not guarantee correct entitlement.
Q: When should organisations prioritise short-lived tokens over convenience?
A: Prioritise short-lived tokens when revocation is slow, third-party access is common, or service identities are reused across environments.
Q: How do security teams know if token scope is actually working?
A: Token scope is working only if a credential can perform its stated job and nothing beyond it, even when used by an autonomous process.
Practitioner guidance
- Map every token to an owner and business purpose Create an inventory that links each API token, OAuth grant, and service token to a named owner, system, and approval path.
- Enforce strict scope and audience checks Require every API gateway and service to validate issuer, audience, signature, and scope before processing requests.
- Test for BOLA with real authorised sessions Use authenticated testing to exercise object IDs, tenant boundaries, and workflow transitions with valid tokens.
What's in the full article
LEVO's full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step explanation of JWT, opaque tokens, OAuth access tokens, refresh tokens, and service tokens in real deployment context
- Detailed attack and misconfiguration examples, including token leakage, replay, over-scoping, and issuer or audience misbinding
- Practical comparisons between token authentication and session-based authentication for API, mobile, and microservice architectures
- Levo-specific detection and validation workflow examples for runtime API testing and access control verification
👉 Read LEVO's analysis of token authentication for modern API security →
API token scopes and validation: are your controls keeping up?
Explore further
06/09/2026 5:19 pm
Token authentication is now an NHI governance discipline, not just an application pattern. A service token, OAuth access token, or API token is a non-human identity artifact with scope, lifetime, and reuse rules attached. That means identity teams cannot treat API access as separate from NHI governance, because the same lifecycle questions apply: who issued it, where it is accepted, how long it lasts, and when it is revoked. Practitioners should manage tokens as governed identities with measurable blast radius.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 85% of organisations lack full visibility into third-party vendors connected via OAuth apps, according to The State of Non-Human Identity Security.
- 45% of organisations cite lack of credential rotation as the top cause of NHI-related attacks, while 37% cite inadequate monitoring and logging.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What is the difference between token authentication and session-based authentication?
A: Token authentication sends a signed token with each request, so control is explicit and stateless. Session-based authentication relies on server-managed session state and a persistent session identifier, which is easier for browser-centric apps but less flexible for distributed APIs and machine-to-machine traffic.
👉 Read our full editorial: Token authentication now defines API access control and breach risk
