Alternatives to 42Crunch for DevSecOps engineers

middleBrick is a self-service API security scanner that operates as a black-box tool. You submit a target URL and receive a risk score from A to F with prioritized findings. It does not require agents, SDKs, or changes to your codebase and works with any language, framework, or cloud environment. Scan time is under a minute, using read-only methods such as GET and HEAD, with text-only POST allowed for LLM probes.

The scanner covers 12 categories aligned to OWASP API Top 10 (2023). It detects authentication bypasses and JWT misconfigurations such as alg=none, weak algorithms, expired tokens, missing claims, and sensitive data in claims. Other areas include BOLA and IDOR via sequential ID enumeration, BFLA and privilege escalation through admin endpoint probing, property over-exposure, input validation issues like CORS wildcard usage, rate limiting characteristics, data exposure including PII and API key patterns, encryption misconfigurations, SSRF indicators, inventory management gaps, unsafe consumption surfaces, and LLM/AI security probes across multiple tiers.

For frameworks with formal descriptions, findings map directly to OWASP API Top 10 (2023). The tool also supports audit evidence collection and helps prepare for security controls described in SOC 2 Type II and PCI-DSS 4.0 through its detection logic and reporting.

middleBrick parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 documents with recursive $ref resolution. It cross-references spec definitions against runtime behavior to identify undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination. Authenticated scanning is available from the Starter tier onward, supporting Bearer tokens, API keys, Basic auth, and cookies. Domain verification is enforced through DNS TXT records or HTTP well-known files so only domain owners can scan with credentials. A strict header allowlist ensures only Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-* headers are forwarded.

The Web Dashboard centralizes scans, reports, and score trend tracking, with options to download branded compliance PDFs. The CLI, published as an npm package named middlebrick, runs commands such as middlebrick scan <url> and supports JSON or text output. A GitHub Action is available to act as a CI/CD gate, failing the build when the score drops below a defined threshold. The MCP Server enables scanning from AI coding assistants such as Claude and Cursor.

Pro tier adds continuous monitoring with scheduled rescans every six hours, daily, weekly, or monthly. It provides diff detection across scans to highlight new findings, resolved issues, and score drift. Email alerts are rate-limited to one per hour per API, and webhooks are HMAC-SHA256 signed, with auto-disable after five consecutive failures.

middleBrick is a scanner that detects and reports findings with remediation guidance; it does not fix, patch, block, or remediate issues. It does not perform active SQL injection or command injection testing, which requires intrusive payloads outside its scope. Business logic vulnerabilities are not detected, as they require human context. Blind SSRF is out of scope due to the lack of out-of-band infrastructure, and the tool does not replace a human pentester for high-stakes audits.

The scanner follows a strict safety posture by using read-only methods only and never sending destructive payloads. Private IPs, localhost, and cloud metadata endpoints are blocked at multiple layers. Customer scan data is deletable on demand and purged within 30 days of cancellation. Data is never sold and is not used for model training.