Alternatives to Astra at Pre-seed startups

Traditional security tools often require agents, SDKs, or build-time instrumentation. This scanner operates as a black-box solution, sending only read-only HTTP requests such as GET and HEAD, plus text-only POST for LLM probes. It works across any language, framework, or cloud provider without modifying your codebase or runtime.

The scanner evaluates 12 security categories aligned to OWASP API Top 10 (2023). It checks authentication bypasses and JWT misconfigurations, including alg=none and expired tokens, BOLA and IDOR via sequential and adjacent ID probing, BFLA through admin endpoint discovery and permission leakage, and property authorization risks such as over-exposure and mass-assignment surfaces. Additional coverage includes input validation with CORS wildcard and dangerous method detection, rate limiting and resource consumption patterns, data exposure for PII and API key formats, encryption hygiene like HTTPS redirects and HSTS, SSRF via URL-accepting parameters, inventory issues such as missing versioning, unsafe consumption surfaces, and LLM security through adversarial prompt probes. Each finding is mapped to OWASP API Top 10 (2023) with prioritized remediation guidance.

The tool parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 documents, resolving recursive $ref references. It cross-references spec definitions against runtime behavior to surface undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination. This helps identify discrepancies between declared design and actual implementation behavior.

For authenticated scans at the Starter tier and above, support includes Bearer tokens, API keys, Basic auth, and cookies. Before credentials are accepted, a domain verification gate checks DNS TXT records or an HTTP well-known file to confirm domain ownership. Only a limited set of headers, such as Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-*, are forwarded, reducing unintended exposure during scans.

With Pro tier, scans can be scheduled every 6 hours, daily, weekly, or monthly. Results are compared across runs to detect new findings, resolved issues, and score drift. Alerts are sent via email at a rate-limited pace of 1 per hour per API, and HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks can notify external systems, with auto-disable after 5 consecutive failures. Findings map to PCI-DSS 4.0, SOC 2 Type II, and OWASP API Top 10 (2023), helping you prepare for audits and validate security controls described in these frameworks.