Alternatives to 42Crunch for AI feature pre-release gate

When shipping AI features, teams need to validate security before production exposure without requiring code changes or access to model internals. middleBrick is a self-service API security scanner designed for this gate: submit a URL, receive a risk score from A to F with prioritized findings. The scanner operates as a black-box solution with no agents, no SDK integration, and no access to application code, making it suitable for third-party endpoints and external services used by AI features.

middleBrick maps findings to three core frameworks commonly referenced in security reviews: PCI-DSS 4.0, SOC 2 Type II, and OWASP API Top 10 (2023). For other regulations, the scanner supports audit evidence collection and helps you prepare for controls described in frameworks such as HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001, NIST, CCPA, NIS2, DORA, FedRAMP, DPDP, APPI, PDPA, PIPEDA, PIPA, UK DPA, LGPD, SOX, GLBA, and FERPA through alignment language only.

• Authentication checks including multi-method bypass and JWT misconfigurations such as alg=none, HS256 usage, expired tokens, missing claims, and sensitive data in claims.
• Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA) and Insecure Direct Object Reference (IDOR) via sequential ID enumeration and active adjacent-ID probing.
• Business Logic Flaws and Privilege Escalation (BFLA) through admin endpoint probing and role/permission field leakage.
• Property Authorization issues including over-exposure, internal field leakage, and mass-assignment surface.
• Input Validation covering CORS wildcard usage (with and without credentials), dangerous HTTP methods, and debug endpoints.
• LLM / AI Security with 18 adversarial probes across Quick, Standard, and Deep scan tiers, targeting system prompt extraction, instruction override, DAN and roleplay jailbreaks, data exfiltration, cost exploitation, encoding bypass, translation-embedded injection, few-shot poisoning, markdown injection, multi-turn manipulation, indirect prompt injection, token smuggling, tool-abuse, nested instruction injection, and PII extraction.

The scanner parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 with recursive $ref resolution and cross-references spec definitions against runtime findings to identify undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination. For continuous verification, authenticated scanning supports Bearer, API key, Basic auth, and Cookie methods, and requires a domain verification gate where only the domain owner can scan with credentials. Header forwarding is limited to Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-* headers to reduce exposure surface.

middlebrick scan https://api.example.com/openapi.json --auth-type bearer --auth-token YOUR_TOKEN

Scans complete in under a minute using read-only methods (GET and HEAD) plus text-only POST for LLM probes. Destructive payloads are never sent, and 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 never used for model training.

Detection capabilities include rate-limit header identification, oversized responses, unpaginated arrays, PII patterns such as email and context-aware SSN, API key formats for AWS, Stripe, GitHub, and Slack, error and stack-trace leakage, HSTS and cookie flag checks, and SSRF indicators involving URL-accepting parameters and internal IP detection. The tool does not perform active SQL injection or command injection testing, does not detect business logic vulnerabilities that require domain understanding, and does not replace a human pentester for high-stakes audits.

The Web Dashboard provides scan management, report viewing, score trend tracking, and downloadable branded compliance PDFs. The CLI via the middlebrick npm package supports commands such as middlebrick scan <url> with JSON or text output. A GitHub Action enables CI/CD gating that fails the build when the score drops below a chosen threshold, and an MCP Server allows scanning from AI coding assistants like Claude and Cursor. An API client is available for custom integrations.

Continuous monitoring is available in the Pro tier, offering scheduled rescans every 6 hours, daily, weekly, or monthly, diff detection across scans, email alerts rate-limited to one per hour per API, and HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks that auto-disable after 5 consecutive failures.

• Free: $0, 3 scans per month, CLI access.
• Starter: $99 per month, 15 APIs, monthly scans, dashboard, email alerts, MCP Server.
• Pro: $499 per month, 100 APIs (+$7 per additional), continuous monitoring, GitHub Action gates, CI/CD integration, Slack/Teams alerts, compliance reports, signed webhooks.
• Enterprise: $2000+ per month, unlimited APIs, custom rules, SSO, audit logs, SLA, dedicated support.