Why I Started APIDynamics: Securing the New Frontier of Machine-to-Machine Trust

APIDynamics
Jul 16
3 min read

By Tippu Gagguturu Founder of APIDynamics

When I started SecurEnds, we were focused on human identity governance — ensuring the right people had the right access. But as I spent more time working closely with CISOs, CIOs, and CTOs, I noticed a blind spot growing larger and more dangerous by the day:APIs — and more specifically, machine identities.

While user identities are gated by IAM, SSO, MFA, and role reviews, APIs often operate with:

Static tokens that never expire
Minimal context awareness
No real-time decision-making
Zero enforcement of adaptive security controls

This made no sense — especially considering how much power APIs now hold in cloud-native, AI-driven architectures.

The Rise of Agentic AI and the Challenge of Trust

The modern enterprise is no longer just a system of people — it’s a network of software agents, AI services, and automated workflows.

Agentic AI, in particular, introduces a new class of behavior:

It makes autonomous decisions
It delegates subtasks across systems via APIs
It initiates workflows without human input
And it evolves, based on data and interactions

These agents are not bound by fixed IPs or session behaviors. They are dynamic, distributed, and capable of operating faster than any human.

And what enables them?

Machine-to-machine API calls.

In this world, an API call from an AI agent to an MCP (multi-component processing) server could:

Spin up a production workload
Modify financial calculations
Trigger sensitive downstream processes

Yet most of these calls are authenticated once with a token, then implicitly trusted forever.

That’s not Zero Trust. That’s Zero Defense.

Why Existing Authentication Breaks Down

Let’s break it down technically.

Current approach:

Use a static API key or a long-lived OAuth token
Authenticate once
Reuse the token for weeks or months
Build trust on the assumption that the origin is unchanged

What goes wrong:

Tokens get leaked (via logs, misconfigurations, code repos)
Agents get compromised or misconfigured
Workloads are cloned or reused in risky ways
Lateral movement becomes trivial for attackers

No session awareness.No contextual evaluation.No enforcement when behavior deviates.

This is the API equivalent of giving a valet your car keys… and never checking if they’re still the valet.

Enter: Adaptive Authentication with Machine-Friendly MFA

APIDynamics was created to fix this — from the ground up.

It’s not just about visibility. It’s about control. In real time. At scale.

Here’s how it works:

Every API call is evaluated for context — location, user agent, behavioral pattern, frequency, and more
A real-time risk score is calculated
Based on policy:
- Low risk = pass through
- Medium risk = challenge with MFA (via TOTP token in header)
- High risk = block, alert, or isolate

👉 Yes, even machines can perform MFA.

Agentic AI clients can use SDKs to generate TOTP codes tied to their secret
Or they can request challenge tokens from APIDynamics prior to sensitive actions

It’s context-aware, just-in-time, and frictionless for valid clients — yet powerful enough to stop token abuse, misuse, or privilege escalation.

What Makes It Different

Most API security tools give you:

Dashboards
Traffic analysis
Alerts after something has gone wrong

APIDynamics gives you:

Prevention through real-time risk scoring
Enforcement through adaptive authentication
MFA for every API call — even machine-to-machine
A unified control plane to bring it all together

And the best part? It doesn’t slow development down.It integrates natively into your existing DevSecOps pipelines.

Why It Matters Now

The perimeter is gone.User accounts are no longer the only attack surface.APIs are the new front door — and back door — to your business.

With Agentic AI, serverless computing, SaaS-to-SaaS workflows, and multi-cloud orchestration, we are entering an era where every API call must be treated as a potential breach vector.

That’s the reality APIDynamics is built for.