Alternatives to APIsec for Platform engineers
What middleBrick covers
- Black-box scanning without agents or code access
- Risk score A–F with prioritized findings
- Detection aligned to PCI-DSS 4.0, SOC 2, OWASP API Top 10
- OpenAPI 3.0/3.1/Swagger 2.0 parsing with $ref resolution
- Authenticated scanning with header allowlist and domain verification
- Continuous monitoring with diff detection and webhook alerts
Black-box scanning for any stack
middleBrick is a self-service API security scanner that requires no agents, SDKs, or code access. You submit a target URL and receive a risk score from A to F with prioritized findings within under a minute. The scanner uses read-only methods (GET and HEAD) plus text-only POST for LLM probes and works regardless of language, framework, or cloud environment.
Detection aligned to major standards
The scanner maps findings to PCI-DSS 4.0, SOC 2 Type II, and OWASP API Top 10 (2023). It detects 12 categories including Authentication bypass, JWT misconfigurations such as alg=none and expired tokens, BOLA and IDOR via sequential ID enumeration, BFLA and privilege escalation probes, Property Authorization over-exposure, Input Validation issues like CORS wildcard with credentials, Rate Limiting and oversized responses, Data Exposure including Luhn-validated card patterns and API key formats, Encryption checks such as HTTPS redirect and HSTS, SSRF against URL-accepting parameters, Inventory Management issues like missing versioning, and LLM / AI Security probes covering system prompt extraction and jailbreaks.
OpenAPI analysis and authenticated scanning
It parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 with recursive $ref resolution and cross-references spec definitions against runtime findings to highlight undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination. For authenticated scanning, the Starter tier and above supports Bearer, API key, Basic auth, and Cookie methods. Domain verification is enforced through DNS TXT records or an HTTP well-known file so only the domain owner can scan with credentials, and only a limited set of headers is forwarded.
Product features and continuous monitoring
The Web Dashboard centralizes scan results, score trends, and branded compliance PDF downloads. The CLI offers middlebrick scan with JSON or text output. The GitHub Action acts as a CI/CD gate and fails the build when the score drops below a set threshold. The MCP Server enables scanning from AI coding assistants. With Pro tier, scheduled rescans every 6 hours, daily, weekly, or monthly produce diff detection for new findings, resolved findings, and score drift. Email alerts are rate-limited to 1 per hour per API, and HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks auto-disable after 5 consecutive failures.
Pricing and safety posture
Free tier provides 3 scans per month and CLI access. Starter at 99 dollars per month covers 15 APIs, monthly scans, dashboard, email alerts, and MCP Server. Pro at 499 dollars per month supports 100 APIs with additional APIs at 7 dollars each, continuous monitoring, GitHub Action gates, CI/CD integration, Slack and Teams alerts, compliance reports, and signed webhooks. Enterprise at 2000 dollars per month offers unlimited APIs, custom rules, SSO, audit logs, SLA, and dedicated support. Scan data is deletable on demand and purged within 30 days of cancellation, and customer data is never sold or used for model training.
Limitations and integration notes
middleBrick does not fix, patch, block, or remediate. It provides prioritized findings and remediation guidance. It does not perform active SQL injection or command injection, does not detect business logic vulnerabilities, does not detect blind SSRF, and does not replace a human pentester for high-stakes audits. For integrations, use the API client to programmatically trigger scans, ingest results, and enforce quality gates within your existing tooling and workflows.