Alternatives to Akto in Government

middleBrick is a self-service API security scanner designed for government evaluation of external and internal API surfaces. Submit an API endpoint, receive a letter-grade risk score from A to F, and a prioritized list of findings. The scanner operates as a black-box solution with no agents, no SDK integration, and no access to application code or infrastructure. It supports any language, framework, or cloud environment and completes most scans in under a minute using read-only methods such as GET and HEAD, with text-only POST used for LLM probes.

Findings map directly to three core frameworks commonly referenced in government procurement and audit contexts: PCI-DSS 4.0, SOC 2 Type II, and OWASP API Top 10 (2023). Detection covers authentication bypass, JWT misconfigurations such as alg=none and missing claims, BOLA and IDOR via sequential ID enumeration, BFLA and privilege escalation attempts, over-exposed properties and mass-assignment surfaces, input validation issues like CORS wildcard usage, rate-limiting gaps, data exposure including PII and API key leakage, encryption misconfigurations, SSRF probes against URL-accepting parameters, and inventory management concerns such as missing versioning. The scanner also includes 18 adversarial LLM security probes across Quick, Standard, and Deep tiers, targeting system prompt extraction, instruction override, jailbreak techniques, data exfiltration attempts, and token smuggling.

Authenticated scanning is available from the Starter tier onward, supporting Bearer tokens, API keys, Basic authentication, and cookies. Domain verification is enforced through DNS TXT records or an HTTP well-known file to ensure only the domain owner can submit credentials. The scanner forwards a restricted allowlist of headers, including Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-*, and read-only methods are strictly enforced. Destructive payloads are never sent, private IPs and localhost are blocked at multiple layers, and customer scan data can be deleted on demand and purged within 30 days of cancellation.

The scanner parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 definitions with recursive $ref resolution, cross-referencing the spec against runtime behavior to identify undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination. Results are surfaced through a web dashboard with trend tracking, branded compliance PDFs, and a CLI via the middlebrick npm package that outputs JSON or text. A GitHub Action can gate CI/CD pipelines, failing builds when scores drop below a defined threshold. The MCP Server enables scanning from AI coding assistants, and a programmable API supports custom integrations for continuous monitoring and workflow automation.

middleBrick is a scanning tool and does not fix, patch, block, or remediate findings; it provides detection and guidance. It does not perform active SQL injection or command injection testing, does not detect business logic vulnerabilities, and does not perform blind SSRF testing that requires out-of-band infrastructure. The tool supports audit evidence for relevant frameworks and helps prepare for evaluations, but it is not an auditor and cannot certify compliance. For regulations such as HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001, NIST, CCPA, or others, use alignment language only to describe how findings support audit activities.