Alternatives to 42Crunch on Express

middleBrick is a self-service API security scanner designed to work without agents or code access. You submit a URL, and within under a minute you receive a risk score from A to F with prioritized findings. The scanner supports any language and framework, including Express, because it operates as a black-box tool. It uses read-only methods such as GET and HEAD, plus text-only POST for LLM probes, ensuring no destructive payloads are sent against your services.

The scanner evaluates 12 security categories aligned to the OWASP API Top 10 (2023). For Express APIs, relevant detections include authentication bypass and JWT misconfigurations such as alg=none or expired tokens, authorization issues like BOLA and BFLA, input validation problems including CORS wildcard usage and dangerous HTTP methods, and data exposure risks such as PII patterns and API key leakage. Findings map directly to OWASP API Top 10, and where applicable they align with security controls described in PCI-DSS 4.0 and SOC 2 Type II.

middleBrick parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 documents with recursive $ref resolution, then correlates the spec definitions against runtime behavior for Express services. This helps identify undefined security schemes, sensitive fields exposed in responses, deprecated operations, and missing pagination. The comparison highlights gaps between documented expectations and actual responses, supporting audit evidence for design reviews without claiming any compliance certification.

With Starter tier and above, you can enable authenticated scanning for Express endpoints using Bearer, API key, Basic auth, or Cookie credentials. Domain verification is enforced through a DNS TXT record or an HTTP well-known file, ensuring only the domain owner can scan with credentials. The scanner forwards a strict header allowlist limited to Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-* headers. Private IPs, localhost, and cloud metadata endpoints are blocked at multiple layers, and scan data is deletable on demand and never used for model training.

Findings are accessible through the Web Dashboard, where you can view reports, track score trends, and download branded compliance PDFs. The CLI npm package supports commands such as middlebrick scan <url> with JSON or text output. A GitHub Action can gate CI/CD, failing the build when the score drops below your chosen threshold. For ongoing visibility, Pro tier provides scheduled rescans every 6 hours, daily, weekly, or monthly, with diff detection across scans and email alerts rate-limited to one per hour per API. HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks are available, auto-disabled after 5 consecutive failures.

The scanner includes specific checks for LLM/AI security, performing 18 adversarial probes across Quick, Standard, and Deep tiers. These probes cover system prompt extraction, instruction override attempts, DAN and roleplay jailbreaks, data exfiltration patterns, cost exploitation, encoding bypasses, translation-embedded injection, few-shot poisoning, markdown injection, multi-turn manipulation, indirect prompt injection, token smuggling, tool abuse, nested instruction injection, and PII extraction. It is important to note that middleBrick does not fix, patch, or block issues; it detects and reports with remediation guidance. It does not perform active SQL injection or command injection testing, does not detect business logic vulnerabilities, does not detect blind SSRF, and does not replace a human pentester for high-stakes audits.