Alternatives to Astra at Series B/C companies

middleBrick is a self-service API security scanner that operates as a black-box solution. You submit a target URL and receive a risk score ranging from A to F along with prioritized findings. The scanner uses read-only methods, including GET and HEAD, plus text-only POST for LLM probes, and completes a scan in under a minute. No agents, SDKs, or code access are required, making it applicable to any language, framework, or cloud environment without introducing runtime instrumentation.

The scanner covers 12 security 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. It identifies BOLA and IDOR via sequential ID enumeration and active adjacent-ID probing, and BFLA and privilege escalation through admin endpoint probing and role/permission leakage. Additional categories include property authorization over-exposure, input validation issues like CORS wildcards and dangerous HTTP methods, rate limiting and resource consumption signals, data exposure risks including PII patterns and API key formats, encryption misconfigurations, SSRF indicators, inventory management gaps, unsafe consumption surfaces, and LLM/AI security adversarial probes across tiered scan depths.

For specifications, middleBrick 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. The tool maps findings to OWASP API Top 10 (2023) and supports audit evidence collection for SOC 2 Type II and PCI-DSS 4.0 frameworks.

Authenticated scanning is available from the Starter tier onward, supporting Bearer tokens, API keys, Basic auth, and cookies. A domain verification gate, such as a DNS TXT record or an HTTP well-known file, ensures that only the domain owner can run scans with credentials. The scanner forwards a restricted header allowlist that includes Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-* headers to limit exposure of unrelated authentication contexts.

The Web Dashboard centralizes scan management, report viewing, score trend tracking, and downloadable branded compliance PDFs. The CLI, distributed as an npm package named middlebrick, supports commands such as middlebrick scan <url> with JSON or text output. A GitHub Action enables CI/CD gating to fail builds when scores drop below a defined threshold, and an MCP Server allows scanning from AI coding assistants like Claude and Cursor. An API client offers programmatic access for custom integrations.

Pro tier adds continuous monitoring with scheduled rescans at intervals of six hours, daily, weekly, or monthly. It provides diff detection across scans to surface new findings, resolved findings, and score drift. Email alerts are rate-limited to one per hour per API, and HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks can auto-disable after five consecutive failures. These features are designed to integrate into existing workflows without replacing deeper investigative activities.

The scanner employs a read-only safety posture and never sends 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, and it is never sold or used for model training.

It does not fix, patch, block, or remediate issues; it detects and reports with remediation guidance. It does not perform active SQL injection or command injection testing, which would require intrusive payloads outside its scope. It does not detect business logic vulnerabilities, blind SSRF relying on out-of-band infrastructure, or replace human pentesters for high-stakes audits. These limitations are documented to set appropriate expectations for security teams.