Alternatives to 42Crunch on Flask

middleBrick is a self-service API security scanner that operates as a black-box solution with no agents, no code access, and no SDK integration. You submit a URL and receive a risk score from A to F with prioritized findings. The scanner uses only read-only methods such as GET and HEAD, plus text-only POST for LLM probes, and typically completes a scan in under a minute. This approach works with any language, framework, or cloud, including Flask services, without requiring instrumentation or changes to your application.

For Flask APIs, middleBrick maps findings directly to OWASP API Top 10 (2023) across 12 categories. Detection capabilities include authentication bypass and JWT misconfigurations such as alg=none, HS256, expired tokens, missing claims, and sensitive data in claims. The scanner probes for BOLA and IDOR via sequential ID enumeration and active adjacent-ID probing, and identifies BFLA and privilege escalation through admin endpoint probing and role/permission field leakage. Additional coverage spans property authorization over-exposure, input validation issues like CORS wildcard usage and dangerous HTTP methods, rate limiting and resource consumption signals, data exposure patterns including PII and API key formats, encryption misconfigurations, SSRF indicators, and unsafe consumption surfaces.

middleBrick parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 for Flask-defined APIs, resolving recursive $ref references and cross-referencing spec definitions against runtime behavior. Findings include undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination. For authenticated scanning at the Starter tier and above, the scanner supports Bearer, API key, Basic auth, and Cookie methods. Domain verification is enforced through DNS TXT records or an HTTP well-known file, ensuring only the domain owner can scan with credentials. A strict header allowlist limits proxied headers to Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-*.

With Pro tier, middleBrick provides continuous monitoring for Flask APIs, including scheduled rescans every 6 hours, daily, weekly, or monthly. The system detects diffs across scans to surface new findings, resolved findings, and score drift, and sends rate-limited email alerts at most once per hour per API. HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks are delivered with auto-disable after 5 consecutive failures. Integration options include a web dashboard for tracking score trends and downloading branded compliance PDFs, a CLI via the middlebrick npm package using middlebrick scan <url> with JSON or text output, a GitHub Action for CI/CD gating that fails builds below a score threshold, and an MCP Server for use with AI coding assistants.

middleBrick is a scanner that detects and reports with remediation guidance; it does not fix, patch, block, or remediate. For Flask APIs, it does not perform active SQL injection or command injection, which require intrusive payloads outside scope, nor does it detect business logic vulnerabilities that need domain context. Blind SSRF is out of scope due to the lack of out-of-band infrastructure. The scanner blocks private IPs, localhost, and cloud metadata endpoints at multiple layers, and customer scan data is deletable on demand and purged within 30 days of cancellation. No data is sold or used for model training.

middleBrick offers a Free tier with 3 scans per month and CLI access, a Starter tier at 99 US dollars per month for 15 APIs with monthly scans and dashboard features, a Pro tier at 499 US dollars per month for 100 APIs with continuous monitoring and CI/CD integration, and Enterprise at 2000 US dollars per month for unlimited APIs with custom rules and SLA. The product helps you prepare for compliance by aligning with security controls described in PCI-DSS 4.0, SOC 2 Type II, and OWASP API Top 10 (2023). It surfaces findings relevant to audit evidence but does not certify or guarantee compliance with any regulation.