RESTful API Security Best Practices
The Critical Role of API Security in Modern Enterprises
APIs are no longer technical afterthoughts or silent enablers of applications—they are the new nervous system of the enterprise. As businesses race toward digitization, RESTful APIs have evolved from simple integration points into high-value assets that fuel critical operations, customer experiences, and revenue streams.
Yet, herein lies the paradox: as APIs become more vital, they also become more vulnerable. Many organizations still treat API security as an extension of perimeter security or a simple checklist during development. This mindset is not just outdated—it is dangerous. Protecting RESTful APIs must be recognized as a primary security pillar, not a subsidiary concern.
Modern enterprises face a reality where APIs are their most exposed and least visible attack surfaces. Unlike traditional network edges, APIs blur boundaries across cloud environments, third-party ecosystems, and mobile apps. They introduce an architectural openness that attackers exploit with precision. The 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report noted a sharp increase in breaches originating from unsecured or poorly monitored APIs—a trend that shows no sign of slowing.
For CISOs, CFOs, and information security leaders, the stakes are higher than ever. A single compromised API can lead to catastrophic data loss, regulatory penalties, and irreversible damage to brand trust. More critically, because APIs often expose core business logic rather than static data, their compromise allows attackers to manipulate transactions, siphon financial assets, and disrupt essential operations.
Forward-thinking security leaders now recognize that API security is not about protecting “pipes.” It’s about protecting business value and digital trust at their fundamental levels. API vulnerabilities are business vulnerabilities.
Unfortunately, many standard security practices overlook subtle, API-specific risks:
- Over-permissioned tokens with excessive scope
- Orphaned APIs left unmonitored after mergers or rapid development sprints
- Business logic abuses that traditional vulnerability scanners miss
These hidden risks demand a new, more strategic mindset. Securing RESTful APIs is no longer a tactical necessity—it is a critical business strategy for digital resilience and competitive advantage.
In the following sections, we will break down the foundational and advanced best practices that empower enterprises to defend their APIs and strengthen their entire cybersecurity posture through API-centric strategies.
The Silent Attack Surface: Why RESTful APIs Are Prime Targets
RESTful APIs represent one of the most underestimated and poorly defended enterprise architecture layers today. Unlike firewalls, endpoints, or user accounts, APIs operate quietly in the background, invisibly stitching services, systems, and customer experiences together. This invisibility makes them such an attractive, high-value target for cyber adversaries.
APIs expose structured access to critical business functions and sensitive data, but they do so often without the rigorous visibility and control frameworks applied to other IT assets. While organizations have hardened traditional perimeters, APIs have quietly extended new pathways directly into the heart of business processes. Attackers understand this shift acutely and have adapted their tactics to hunt APIs specifically.
One seldom-discussed risk is the unintentional architectural sprawl caused by the accelerated pace of digital transformation. Development teams are under pressure to innovate and deploy microservices and APIs quickly. Whether documented or not, each new API creates a new micro-attack surface. Over time, organizations accumulate hundreds or thousands of APIs with varying security maturity levels. Without systematic discovery and governance, many of these APIs become “invisible infrastructure”—critical to operations but entirely unmonitored.
Moreover, RESTful APIs often amplify security risks by exposing more than just data: they reveal business logic, workflow sequences, and system interdependencies. Skilled attackers don’t merely steal data through APIs; they manipulate the exposed logic to execute fraudulent transactions, escalate privileges, or disrupt operations without triggering traditional security alarms.
Another overlooked vector is the compound threat of third-party API dependencies. Enterprises increasingly integrate third-party APIs to enrich services or enhance functionality. However, each third-party API represents a potential chain of trust, and attackers only need one weak link to penetrate deeply interconnected environments. Few organizations perform continuous risk assessments of third-party APIs post-integration, leaving significant blind spots.
The silent attack surface created by RESTful APIs is not theoretical; it is now the frontline of cyber risk. Without proactive discovery, rigorous authentication, and continuous monitoring, APIs offer threat actors a path of least resistance—one paved by innovation but unguarded by design.
Securing this invisible frontier requires more than after-the-fact controls. It demands a deliberate, architecture-level shift in how security leaders perceive, manage, and prioritize their API ecosystems.
Foundational Best Practices: Securing APIs at the Core
Proper API security doesn’t start at deployment; it begins long before the first line of code is written. Building resilient RESTful APIs demands a fundamental rethinking of how security is embedded across the entire API lifecycle—from design to retirement. Enterprises that treat API security as a bolt-on feature inevitably chase threats after damage has occurred.
Instead, security must be ingrained at the architectural core, woven into every API development and management phase. The following foundational practices are defensive measures and proactive strategies that strengthen APIs as secure digital products from inception.
Embrace “Secure by Design” Principles
In many organizations, development velocity has eclipsed security discipline. APIs are often rushed into production with minimal threat modeling, assuming that external security layers will compensate for insecure logic. This mindset must change.
“Secure by Design” mandates that security risks are identified, modeled, and mitigated during the design phase, not after. This includes mapping potential misuse cases, defining strict data handling policies, and designing for the least functionality. Crucially, it also means minimizing data exposure: APIs should never return more information than is necessary, even to authenticated users.
Security-conscious design anticipates technical failures and human misuse, malicious or accidental. Organizations drastically reduce the attack surface before a single packet leaves production by treating API design as a security-critical activity.
Apply the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP)
Too often, APIs grant more access than required due to overly broad permissions or convenience-driven shortcuts. Every additional permission elevates risk exponentially, not linearly.
Applying the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) means crafting access controls that grant the bare minimum rights needed for a user, application, or service to perform its legitimate function. This includes precisely limiting API keys, tokens, and OAuth scopes and ensuring that access is time-bound whenever possible.
One commonly overlooked tactic is dynamic privilege management (PoLP). Instead of static permission sets, build APIs that adjust access based on real-time context, such as user location, device health, or transaction patterns. By enforcing dynamic PoLP, organizations create APIs that minimize risk and adapt intelligently to evolving threats.
Authenticate and Authorize Every Request
In API environments, trust is an illusion. Every internal or external request must be treated as untrusted until proven otherwise.
Authentication and authorization must operate at every layer: user identity, device, application, and individual API function calls. Many breaches exploit implicit trust within internal systems, where APIs fail to re-authenticate internal service-to-service communications. This is where authentic Zero-Trust architecture begins.
Modern best practices extend beyond validating the requestor; they include validating the intent of the request. Behavioral profiling and context-aware authorization can detect when an authenticated user begins acting outside normal parameters, long before traditional security tools raise an alarm.
Ignoring the authentication and authorization of machine-to-machine (M2M) API traffic is another blind spot that few security programs adequately address. Attackers know M2M channels often lack the same scrutiny as human interfaces, making them prime targets.
Advanced Protection Tactics: Going Beyond the Basics
Foundational API security sets a strong baseline, but today’s threat landscape demands more. Sophisticated attackers have evolved beyond exploiting common vulnerabilities; they now target subtle misconfigurations, logic flaws, and overlooked operational gaps. To outpace them, security leaders must elevate their strategy from foundational to adaptive, where security dynamically strengthens as threats evolve.
Advanced protection tactics don’t just mitigate risk—they actively reduce threat dwell time, shrink attack surfaces in real time, and make APIs harder, costlier, and riskier for attackers to exploit.
Use OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect Properly
OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect (OIDC) are often hailed as gold standards for secure authorization and identity federation. However, their effectiveness hinges entirely on correct implementation—something far fewer organizations achieve than is assumed.
A seldom-discussed vulnerability is over-scoped OAuth tokens, which grant far broader access than necessary. Once obtained, attackers exploit these tokens, often moving laterally across services that share authentication infrastructure. Organizations must strictly define granular scopes and expiration times for each token issued to counter this.
Equally critical is protecting OAuth authorization servers as primary assets. Most security strategies focus on the resource server (API endpoints) while neglecting the authorization server. Compromise of the authorization server is effectively compromise of the entire API ecosystem. Regularly harden, audit, and monitor these servers with the same vigilance as production APIs.
Encrypt Data Everywhere—In Transit and at Rest
Encryption is often treated as a compliance checkbox, yet its strategic implementation can be a serious differentiator in proper API security.
Beyond enforcing HTTPS/TLS for transit encryption, organizations should adopt mutual TLS (mTLS) for critical internal API communications. mTLS encrypts the traffic and ensures that both the client and server validate each other’s authenticity, drastically reducing the risk of impersonation attacks inside corporate environments.
Another overlooked frontier: fine-grained field-level encryption. Not all sensitive data inside a payload must be exposed to all parties, even within the same transaction. Encrypting specific fields (e.g., personally identifiable information, financial data) within a JSON or XML response ensures that the most critical assets remain protected even if transport encryption fails.
Rate Limit and Throttle Strategically
Most organizations implement rate limiting as an afterthought, setting arbitrary thresholds without considering the context of user behavior or business risk. Done correctly, however, strategic rate limiting becomes a powerful defensive layer against automated and human-driven attacks.
Advanced practices include:
- Behavioral baselines: Dynamic throttling based on deviations from historical API usage patterns.
- Progressive backoff: Slowing down abusive clients gradually, rather than blocking them outright, to avoid tipping off sophisticated attackers prematurely.
- Per-endpoint throttling: Different thresholds for different API functions, prioritizing sensitive operations (e.g., password resets, financial transactions) with tighter controls.
Intelligent throttling defends against volumetric denial-of-service attacks and acts as an early warning system, revealing reconnaissance attempts and anomalous access patterns long before breaches occur.
API Discovery and Shadow API Risk Management
You cannot protect what you cannot see. In the era of cloud-native development and decentralized engineering, APIs are created at unprecedented speed, often without the security team’s awareness. This silent proliferation introduces “shadow APIs,” rogue endpoints operating outside governance frameworks, posing one of the most insidious risks to enterprise security today.
API discovery and shadow API management are no longer optional but foundational imperatives. Without a dynamic and continuous inventory of your known, unknown, and forgotten APIs, you leave critical gaps that attackers are eager to exploit.
The Hidden Risk of Shadow APIs
Shadow APIs aren’t necessarily malicious by design. They often arise innocently—developers spin up temporary endpoints for testing, partners build unofficial integrations, or legacy APIs remain active after migrations. Yet, each untracked API becomes a new blind spot.
Shadow APIs typically lack basic security measures:
- No authentication enforcement
- Default or verbose error messaging that leaks internal architecture
- Unpatched vulnerabilities due to “set and forget” deployments
Attackers increasingly weaponize these forgotten APIs because they often bypass monitoring, logging, and security controls that govern sanctioned APIs. For adversaries, shadow APIs are digital side doors into otherwise hardened environments.
Continuous API Discovery as a Security Strategy
Periodic audits and static asset inventories are insufficient. Enterprises must implement continuous, automated API discovery solutions that map and classify all API traffic across environments—on-premises, multi-cloud, and hybrid.
Best practices include:
- Passive traffic inspection: Capturing API usage patterns without impacting performance.
- Active scanning: Proactively querying network ranges and endpoints to uncover undocumented APIs.
- Metadata enrichment: Tagging APIs with ownership, business criticality, and security posture for intelligent prioritization.
A mature discovery program doesn’t just list APIs—it contextualizes them. CISOs and information security leaders must know who owns this API, what data it exposes, which regulations apply, and what its risk profile is.
Lifecycle Governance: Beyond Discovery
Discovery is the beginning—not the end—of shadow API management. Organizations must enforce full API lifecycle governance:
- Onboarding controls: No API should move into production without registration, risk assessment, and approval.
- Version control policies: Old API versions must be deprecated and decommissioned methodically to avoid abandonment.
- Automated retirement: APIs with no legitimate traffic over a defined period should trigger alerts for deactivation or deletion.
APIs are treated like digital products in the most resilient enterprises—each with assigned owners, defined service levels, and retirement plans.
Ignoring shadow APIs is no longer an oversight—it’s a dereliction of cybersecurity duty.
Active discovery and disciplined management transform the chaotic sprawl of APIs into a governed, resilient ecosystem that strengthens—not weakens—your enterprise’s digital fortress.
Continuous Monitoring and Real-Time Threat Detection
Even the most robust API defenses degrade over time without continuous vigilance. Static controls alone cannot protect dynamic, interconnected API ecosystems from evolving threats. True resilience comes from persistent, intelligent monitoring and the ability to detect and respond to anomalies in real time—before they escalate into breaches.
Continuous monitoring transforms API security from a reactive posture into a proactive, predictive defense strategy, making it a cornerstone for modern security programs.
Moving Beyond Traditional Logging
Traditional API logging typically records basic request and response data for forensic purposes. However, today’s threat actors operate at a level where simple audit trails are no longer sufficient.
Advanced continuous monitoring solutions must capture deep telemetry across multiple dimensions, including:
- Request frequency and distribution across endpoints
- Anomalous user-agent strings and geolocation mismatches
- Payload size variations indicating data exfiltration attempts
- Deviations in OAuth token usage patterns
Moreover, contextual awareness is critical. Logging must be enriched with metadata: user identity, device integrity, session history, and business transaction context. Without contextual layering, raw logs offer little value in detecting sophisticated attacks hidden in seemingly legitimate traffic.
Real-Time Behavioral Anomaly Detection
Attackers rarely act like regular users, but catching them requires visibility into subtle behavioral deviations, not just rule-based alerts.
Advanced anomaly detection leverages machine learning models tailored to API usage patterns, building behavioral baselines over time. When deviations occur, such as a service account suddenly invoking endpoints outside its historical scope or a partner application making high-volume data pulls at odd hours, real-time alerts trigger immediate defensive actions.
Critically, anomaly detection must operate per entity: per user, device, and API consumer. Broad, one-size-fits-all baselines produce noise and miss targeted attacks. Fine-grained, entity-specific modeling dramatically improves precision.
Automated Threat Response for APIs
Detection without response is like spotting an intruder but leaving the door open. Modern API security strategies incorporate automated, policy-driven threat response mechanisms that activate when certain risk thresholds are breached.
Examples of automated actions include:
- Throttling or blocking anomalous API clients
- Invalidating suspicious access tokens
- Triggering adaptive authentication challenges for high-risk sessions
- Isolating affected microservices without disrupting the broader application
Automation reduces time-to-containment and ensures consistent, repeatable reactions under stress, removing human error from critical first-response actions.
The future of API defense is not just about seeing threats—it’s about recognizing them at machine speed and acting decisively. Enterprises that embrace continuous, real-time monitoring and adaptive defense strategies will not merely survive the next wave of API-borne threats; they will set the standard for cybersecurity excellence.
Security Testing and DevSecOps Integration
API security cannot remain an isolated checkpoint at the end of the development cycle. In the era of continuous delivery and microservices, security must flow through every phase of the software development lifecycle (SDLC)—seamlessly embedded, constantly validated, and automatically enforced. Integrating security testing into DevOps practices, known as DevSecOps, transforms API security from a bottleneck into a catalyst for velocity and resilience.
The organizations that succeed in API security do not simply scan for vulnerabilities—they engineer security into their development DNA.
Shifting Left: Embedding Security Early
Most enterprises pay lip service to “shift left” principles but fall short in execution. Adequate shift-left security requires embedding API-specific security checks into developer workflows, not just generic static code analysis.
Key tactics include:
- API contract testing: Automatically validate that API schemas (OpenAPI/Swagger specifications) enforce security requirements like strict input validation, authorization scopes, and data minimization.
- Threat modeling automation: Use tooling that automatically analyzes API designs to predict potential attack paths before coding begins.
- Security unit tests: Encourage developers to write tests that validate functionality and security assertions, such as rejecting overly large payloads or preventing unauthorized access scenarios.
By building these tests into pull requests and CI/CD pipelines, vulnerabilities are caught when they are cheapest and fastest to fix—during development, not after production deployment.
Dynamic and Continuous API Security Testing (DAST for APIs)
Traditional dynamic application security testing (DAST) tools struggle with APIs’ complexity and stateful nature. Enterprises must adopt API-native DAST solutions that understand authentication flows, session handling, and complex data structures.
Best practices for continuous API DAST include:
- Stateful testing: Maintain authentication sessions and state transitions to uncover hidden vulnerabilities across chained API calls.
- Business logic abuse testing: Go beyond OWASP Top 10 to simulate attacks that exploit business workflows (e.g., manipulating order flows, bypassing payment gates).
- Environment parity: To catch vulnerabilities earlier, run DAST scans on production, staging, and development environments.
Continuous API security testing isn’t about flooding developers with false positives; it’s about precision validation that integrates naturally into their existing velocity.
Security as Code: Automating Policy Enforcement
API security policies must be codified and enforced automatically to scale securely, not manually negotiated ticket by ticket.
Examples of “Security as Code” for APIs include:
- API Gateway policies: Declaratively define authentication, rate limiting, and threat protection rules at the gateway level as version-controlled code.
- Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) security scanning: Analyze Terraform, Helm, or CloudFormation templates to ensure API deployment environments are configured securely by default.
- Security linting: Integrate security linters into IDEs so developers receive real-time feedback on insecure API patterns as they write code.
By codifying security, enterprises make secure practices repeatable, auditable, and resistant to drift—critical traits in dynamic, high-velocity engineering cultures.
Zero Trust for APIs: The Future of API Security Strategy
The traditional network perimeter has disappeared, replaced by sprawling APIs that act as the new front doors to critical systems. In this new reality, trusting any API client, system, or internal service by default is a catastrophic risk. A true Zero-Trust approach—designed specifically for APIs—is no longer optional. It is the future of resilient enterprise security.
Zero Trust for APIs reimagines security at every layer, enforcing strict authentication, continuous authorization, and deep visibility into every transaction, regardless of source or location.
Principle 1: Never Trust, Always Verify—Even Internally
A common misstep is assuming that internal APIs are inherently secure because they exist behind a firewall or within a VPC. However, insider threats, lateral movement post-compromise, and misconfigurations have rendered this assumption dangerously outdated.
In a Zero Trust model for APIs:
- Every API call must require strong authentication and authorization, even between microservices inside the same network.
- Identity must be tied to specific attributes—not just IP addresses or basic certificates—using techniques like JWT claims or mutual TLS with device identity attestation.
- Trust is not granted permanently; it must be re-evaluated at every request based on the current context and risk indicators.
Principle 2: Enforce Least Privilege Access for API Consumers
Granting broad access scopes “just in case” directly violates Zero Trust. Instead, API consumers—whether users, systems, or partners—must receive only the minimum necessary access for the shortest duration possible.
Key tactics include:
- Fine-grained authorization policies: Move beyond basic role-based access control (RBAC) to attribute-based access control (ABAC) or even policy-based access control (PBAC) frameworks tailored for APIs.
- Dynamic access revocation: Implement mechanisms to revoke access instantly based on changes in user risk posture, device health, or environmental signals (e.g., accessing from a new country or suspicious IP range).
- Ephemeral credentials: Issue short-lived tokens that automatically expire, reducing the window of opportunity for token theft exploitation.
Least privilege is not a one-time configuration; it must adapt dynamically to shifting operational realities.
Principle 3: Microsegmentation for APIs
Microsegmentation—long championed for network security—finds powerful new relevance in API architectures.
Instead of exposing vast swaths of functionality to broad audiences, API endpoints should be segmented and isolated by:
- Application function
- Data sensitivity
- Consumer group
- Risk classification
Each microservice or API segment enforces its access controls, traffic monitoring, and anomaly detection, limiting the blast radius of any single breach. Advanced models encrypt API communications within trusted microsegments to prevent internal eavesdropping or compromise escalation.
In Zero Trust API ecosystems, compromising one endpoint does not equate to compromising the entire system—it becomes a contained, manageable event.
Compliance and Regulatory Considerations for APIs
API security is a technical imperative, a compliance, and a legal mandate. Regulators worldwide increasingly scrutinize how enterprises manage, expose, and protect APIs, recognizing them as critical vectors for personal data breaches, financial fraud, and operational failures. Yet many organizations mistakenly approach API compliance reactively, scrambling to patch gaps only after audits loom or breaches occur.
Proactive, compliance-aligned API security protects the business from fines and reputational damage and builds trust with regulators, partners, and customers.
API Data Handling and Privacy Laws
APIs often inadvertently become conduits for unauthorized data exposure, even when encryption and access controls are in place. Under GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA regulations, API interactions must uphold strict data minimization, consent management, and user rights enforcement principles.
Key compliance practices for API data protection include:
- Selective data exposure: Design APIs to expose only the data fields necessary for each consumer, minimizing overexposure risks.
- Consent-driven access: Integrate consent management directly into API access flows. Tokens should dynamically enforce what data a consumer can retrieve based on the user’s consent.
- Right to erasure support: Ensure APIs support functionality to delete, anonymize, or restrict access to personal data when users exercise their rights.
Critically, APIs must maintain verifiable audit trails showing how data flows were controlled in alignment with regulatory demands, not merely assume compliance by design.
Industry-Specific Standards Impacting APIs
Beyond general privacy laws, sector-specific regulations introduce unique API compliance challenges that many overlook.
Examples include:
- Financial Services (PSD2, GLBA): Open banking APIs must implement strong customer authentication (SCA) and allow real-time user consent revocation.
- Healthcare (HIPAA, HITECH): APIs transmitting electronic protected health information (ePHI) must enforce strict encryption-in-transit standards and comprehensive access logging.
- Retail (PCI DSS): APIs handling payment card data must tokenize sensitive fields and prevent storage of sensitive authentication data beyond authorization.
Meeting these standards requires tailored API design patterns, such as integrating tokenization services at the API layer or enforcing time-bound scopes for financial data APIs.
Building Compliance into the API Lifecycle
Waiting until production to address compliance is a recipe for technical debt and audit failures. Instead, compliance requirements must be embedded throughout the API development lifecycle:
- Policy-as-Code for compliance: Define compliance policies (e.g., “No API may expose unencrypted PII”) as machine-readable rules enforced automatically within CI/CD pipelines.
- Compliance-aware API Gateways: Leverage gateways that dynamically enforce compliance controls like data redaction, consent validation, and access throttling based on regulatory profiles.
- Continuous compliance validation: Implement real-time monitoring and auditing of API interactions to validate ongoing compliance post-deployment, not just at release time.
Embedding compliance into the API lifecycle reduces friction between security, development, and legal teams, making compliance an accelerant, not an obstacle, to digital innovation.
Moving from Reactive to Proactive API Security
The days of treating API security as an afterthought, a bolt-on patch, or a periodic audit exercise are over. In a landscape where APIs are the business, security must evolve from a defensive posture to a core element of strategic advantage. Modern enterprises can no longer afford to react only when breaches surface or regulators knock—they must operationalize proactive, continuous API security as a business-critical competency.
Future-ready organizations see API security not as a cost center but as an enabler of trust, speed, and competitive differentiation.
Embedding Security as a Design Principle
Proactive API security begins on the whiteboard, not during deployment. Leading enterprises make security an architectural cornerstone, applying threat modeling, secure coding practices, and data governance from day one.
Embedding security-by-design means:
- Prioritizing secure defaults: APIs should assume denial of access unless explicitly authorized.
- Designing for least privilege: Each endpoint, method, and data field must have a justified purpose that is aligned with business needs and regulatory requirements.
- Planning for continuous validation: Every change to an API triggers automatic security re-evaluation, not manual retrospective checks.
Security becomes a creative constraint, fueling better, faster, and more resilient product development.
Continuous Investment in Visibility and Adaptability
The API threat landscape shifts daily, fueled by new attack techniques, toolsets, and evolving adversary tactics. Organizations that thrive will be those that invest continuously in:
- Real-time discovery and inventory of every API asset, including shadow and zombie APIs.
- Continuous behavioral monitoring detects known vulnerabilities, emerging anomalies, and abuse patterns.
- Adaptive policy enforcement that can tighten or loosen access dynamically based on risk signals without paralyzing business operations.
Static security programs cannot survive dynamic threat environments. Visibility and adaptability must be treated as living capabilities, not one-time projects.
Shaping a Culture of API Stewardship
Ultimately, technology alone will not drive the shift from reactive to proactive API security. It demands a cultural evolution, where every stakeholder in security, development, operations, compliance, and business leadership shares ownership of API security outcomes.
Enterprises must foster:
- Developer empowerment: Equip developers with secure API design tools, training, and automated safeguards embedded in their workflows.
- Executive sponsorship: Elevate API security to a board-level conversation, tying it directly to risk management and business growth metrics.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Build integrated squads where security, engineering, and compliance collaborate continuously, not just at release milestones.
Proactive API security is not a destination but a new way of operating.
Organizations that embrace this mindset will not only avoid catastrophic breaches, but they will also build enduring, trusted digital businesses ready for whatever the future holds.
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