API security is essential for ensuring that only authorized users and applications can access sensitive data, which involves authentication, authorization, data integrity, confidentiality, safety, and availability. Authentication identifies consumers, while authorization ensures that only those with proper permissions can access or manipulate data. Data integrity is maintained through techniques like digital signatures, ensuring messages are unaltered in transit, while confidentiality protects sensitive information from being intercepted using encryption and transport layer security. Safety involves validating incoming messages to prevent harmful data attacks, and availability ensures the API can handle traffic and remain operational, even under potential threats like denial of service attacks. The Kong Gateway addresses these security concerns with a variety of plugins that facilitate authentication methods, data integrity verification, and protection against potential attacks. Additionally, Kong supports API availability through plugins that manage IP restrictions, rate limiting, bot detection, and proxy caching, while providing full automation support for dynamic scaling using Kubernetes or CI/CD pipelines.