42Crunch for Healthcare

Healthcare APIs move sensitive patient data and must resist injection, tampering, and unauthorized exposure. This scanner reviews endpoints as an external observer, exercising only read-safe methods to map risk across authentication, data exposure, and injection surfaces.

It checks for common misconfigurations such as missing or weak security headers, verbose error messages, and unauthenticated paths that could expose electronic personal health information. By focusing on observable behavior, the approach remains non-intrusive while highlighting where additional controls are advisable.

• Validates presence and correctness of security headers related to data protection.
• Checks for overly detailed error responses that may aid reconnaissance.
• Assesses exposure of sensitive payloads without modifying backend state.

Findings map to controls within PCI-DSS 4.0, SOC 2 Type II, and OWASP API Top 10 (2023), providing structured evidence to support audits that involve healthcare-related data flows.

For frameworks outside this set, the tool aligns with security controls described in regulatory guidance and supports audit evidence collection where applicable, without asserting certification or compliance guarantees.

Examples of supported mappings include authentication validation, sensitive data handling, and logging integrity checks that commonly appear in healthcare assessments.

The scanner detects authentication bypass attempts, insecure direct object references, and data exposure patterns such as email and credit card-like values that may appear in healthcare payloads.

It does not perform active SQL injection or command injection testing, as those require intrusive payloads outside the intended scope. Business logic vulnerabilities and blind SSRF issues are similarly outside automated detection boundaries.

Organizations should supplement scanning with targeted manual review for domain-specific workflows and patient data handling scenarios.

Authenticated scans support Bearer tokens, API keys, Basic authentication, and cookies to validate protected endpoints. Domain verification ensures only the domain owner can submit credentials for scanning.

middlebrick scan https://api.hospital.example.com --auth-type bearer --auth-token <token>

Header forwarding is limited to Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-* to reduce unintended data leakage during assessment.

Pro tier enables scheduled rescans, diff detection for new or resolved findings, and score trend tracking to monitor improvements over time. Alerts are rate-limited and delivered via email or webhooks signed with HMAC-SHA256.

Integration options include a CLI for local runs, a GitHub Action for CI/CD gates, and an MCP server for use with AI-assisted development tools. These features allow embedding checks into development workflows without requiring code access.