Akto for Solo founders

As a solo founder, you need security that fits a small workflow and does not require a dedicated team. middleBrick is a self-service API security scanner designed for this reality: submit a URL and receive a risk score with prioritized findings in under a minute. The scanner performs black-box testing using only read-only methods, avoiding any need for code access, agents, or SDK integration. You can scan APIs built in any language or framework, and authenticated scanning is available when you can provide credentials, protected by domain verification to ensure only the domain owner can run scans with secrets.

The scanner evaluates 12 security categories aligned to the OWASP API Top 10 (2023), providing coverage that maps findings to this standard. Detection capabilities include authentication bypass and JWT misconfigurations, Broken Object Level Authorization and IDOR, BFLA and privilege escalation risks, property over-exposure, input validation issues such as CORS misconfigurations and dangerous HTTP methods, rate limiting and resource consumption characteristics, and data exposure patterns including PII and API key leakage. For compliance, findings map to PCI-DSS 4.0 and SOC 2 Type II, and support audit evidence for relevant control areas. The LLM / AI Security category conducts 18 adversarial probe types across multiple scan tiers, examining model behavior through jailbreak, prompt injection, and data exfiltration scenarios.

middleBrick parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 specifications with recursive $ref resolution, enabling comparison between declared definitions and runtime behavior. This helps surface undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination directly from your spec. The scanner integrates into developer workflows via a CLI, with commands such as middlebrick scan <url> producing JSON or text output. A web dashboard provides scan management, trend tracking, and downloadable compliance reports, while an MCP server enables scanning from AI coding assistants, and a GitHub Action can gate CI/CD when scores drop below your defined threshold.

Authenticated scanning, available from the Starter tier and above, supports Bearer tokens, API keys, Basic auth, and cookies. Before you scan, a domain verification gate using DNS TXT records or an HTTP well-known file ensures that only the domain owner can submit credentials. The scanner forwards a limited set of headers, including Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-* headers. Safety is enforced through read-only methods only; destructive payloads are never sent. Internal infrastructure elements such as private IPs, localhost, and cloud metadata endpoints are blocked at multiple layers, and customer data is deletable on demand and retained only as long as necessary.

It is important to understand what the scanner does not do. It does not fix, patch, block, or remediate issues; it detects and reports with guidance. It does not perform active SQL injection or command injection testing, which would require intrusive payloads outside its scope. Business logic vulnerabilities and blind SSRF are also out of scope, as they often require deep domain context or out-of-band infrastructure. Continuous monitoring, available in the Pro tier, includes scheduled rescans, diff detection across scans, email alerts, HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks, and integration options for Slack or Teams to support ongoing risk visibility.