I’m working on building a REST API for my online store that will handle product data and payment processing. The API needs to work with different types of apps including mobile applications.
My main concern is about safely handling credit card data when it gets sent from external apps to my API endpoints. Right now I have SSL encryption enabled and I’m using OAuth for authentication.
Is this enough protection for handling sensitive payment info, or should I be implementing additional security measures? What are the best practices for accepting financial data through REST APIs from third-party applications?
honestly mate, don’t handle credit card data yourself at all. use stripe or paypal’s apis instead - they do the heavy lifting and you just get tokens back. way less headache with pci compliance and legal stuff. learned this the hard way on my last project.
SSL and OAuth are decent starting points, but they won’t cut it for credit card processing. You need PCI DSS compliance - we’re talking data encryption, network segmentation, security testing, access controls, the whole nine yards. The compliance process takes months and costs a fortune in audits. Here’s the real kicker: if you store payment data directly, you’re exposed to massive liability. One breach could kill your business through fines and lawsuits. I’ve watched small companies get slammed with six-figure penalties after incidents. Honestly? Use payment processors with API solutions instead. Card details go straight to their secure vaults, you get payment tokens to handle transactions. You dodge most compliance headaches and get better security than you could build yourself.
Others covered third-party processors well, but you’ll also want tokenization at the app level and field-level encryption for any sensitive data that has to go through your system. On a fintech project, we added HMAC request signing to stop tampering during transmission, plus rate limiting and IP whitelisting for financial API endpoints. One thing that blindsided us - you need solid audit logging. Every payment API call gets logged with timestamps and user context for compliance. Also, validate inputs strictly and sanitize everything before processing. Stack these with a solid payment gateway and you’ve got the layered security that regulators want to see during audits.