Alternatives to 42Crunch on Gin

middleBrick is a self-service API security scanner that operates without agents, SDKs, or access to source code. You submit a target URL and receive a risk score from A to F with prioritized findings. The scanner uses only read-only HTTP methods—GET and HEAD—and text-only POST for LLM probes. Scan completion typically occurs in under one minute, making it practical for frequent checks across a Gin-based service portfolio.

The scanner covers 12 security categories mapped to the OWASP API Top 10 (2023). For Gin APIs, it checks authentication bypasses, JWT misconfigurations such as alg=none or HS256 with weak secrets, and security header compliance including WWW-Authenticate. It probes for Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA/IDOR) via sequential ID enumeration and adjacent ID traversal, and identifies BFLA and privilege escalation by targeting admin endpoints and inspecting role or permission fields.

Additional detections include over-exposed data fields and mass-assignment surfaces, input validation issues like CORS wildcards and dangerous HTTP methods, and rate-limiting indicators such as missing or inconsistent rate-limit headers. Data exposure checks look for PII patterns including email addresses, Luhn-validated credit card numbers, context-aware SSN formats, and API key artifacts for AWS, Stripe, GitHub, and Slack. Encryption checks verify HTTPS redirects, HSTS presence, and cookie flags. SSRF probes test URL-accepting parameters and body fields for internal IP references, while inventory checks review versioning, legacy paths, and server fingerprints. The LLM security tier runs 18 adversarial probes across Quick, Standard, and Deep scans, testing for system prompt extraction, instruction override, jailbreak techniques, data exfiltration, and token smuggling.

middleBrick parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 documents produced by Gin projects, resolving recursive $ref references. It cross-references the specification against runtime behavior to surface undefined security schemes, unexpected sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination. This comparison helps identify mismatches between documented and actual behavior, which is especially useful when routing and middleware configurations in Gin diverge from the published contract.

Authenticated scanning is available from the Starter tier onward, supporting Bearer tokens, API keys, Basic auth, and cookies. Before credentials are accepted, a domain verification gate confirms ownership through a DNS TXT record or an HTTP well-known file, ensuring that only the domain owner can run authenticated scans. When authenticated, the scanner forwards a restricted allowlist of headers, including Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-* headers.

The scanner integrates into multiple workflows. The web dashboard centralizes scan results, score trends, and allows export of branded compliance PDFs. The CLI, published as an npm package named middlebrick, supports commands such as middlebrick scan <url> with JSON or text output. A GitHub Action can gate CI/CD pipelines, failing builds when the score drops below a defined threshold. An MCP server enables scanning from AI coding assistants like Claude and Cursor, and a programmatic API supports custom integrations.

For ongoing risk management, the Pro tier offers scheduled rescans every 6 hours, daily, weekly, or monthly. Diff detection highlights new findings, resolved findings, and score drift between scans. Alerts are rate-limited to one email per hour per API, and webhooks are HMAC-SHA256 signed, with auto-disable after five consecutive failures to reduce noise.

middleBrick reports findings and provides remediation guidance but does not fix, patch, block, or remediate issues. It does not execute active SQL injection or command injection tests, as those require intrusive payloads outside the scanner’s scope. Business logic vulnerabilities require human analysis specific to your domain, and blind SSRF is out of scope due to the lack of out-of-band infrastructure. The tool does not replace a human pentester for high-stakes audits.

Safety measures include read-only methods only, blocking of private IPs, localhost, and cloud metadata endpoints at multiple layers. Customer scan data is deletable on demand and purged within 30 days of cancellation. Data is never sold or used for model training.