Alternatives to 42Crunch for Solo founders

Unlike platforms that require agents or runtime instrumentation, this scanner operates as a black-box solution. You submit a URL and receive a risk score from A to F within a minute, using only read-only methods such as GET and HEAD plus text-only POST for LLM probes. The approach works across any language, framework, or cloud target without SDK integration or code access.

The scanner covers 12 categories aligned to the OWASP API Top 10 (2023). It maps findings to PCI-DSS 4.0, SOC 2 Type II, and OWASP API Top 10 controls, providing detection for issues such as authentication bypass, JWT misconfigurations, broken object level authorization, privilege escalation, sensitive data exposure including PII and API keys, insecure encryption settings, SSRF indicators, and unsafe consumption surfaces. For other frameworks, it helps you prepare for and supports audit evidence relevant to common security controls.

• Authentication — multi-method bypass, JWT misconfigurations, security headers, WWW-Authenticate compliance.
• BOLA / IDOR — sequential ID enumeration, active adjacent-ID probing.
• BFLA / Privilege Escalation — admin endpoint probing, role/permission field leakage.
• Property Authorization — over-exposure, internal field leakage, mass-assignment surface.
• Input Validation — CORS wildcard with and without credentials, dangerous HTTP methods, debug endpoints.
• LLM / AI Security — adversarial probes across Quick, Standard, and Deep tiers including system prompt extraction and data exfiltration.

The scanner parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 documents with recursive $ref resolution. It cross-references spec definitions against runtime findings to highlight undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination. This helps validate that declared contracts match observed behavior without requiring access to source code or build pipelines.

Authenticated scanning is available from the Starter tier upward, supporting Bearer tokens, API keys, Basic auth, and cookies. Domain verification is enforced via DNS TXT record or an HTTP well-known file to ensure only the domain owner can scan with credentials. The scanner uses a strict header allowlist including Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-* headers. Safety measures include read-only methods only, blocking private IPs, localhost, and cloud metadata endpoints at multiple layers, and a data retention policy that deletable on demand with purging within 30 days of cancellation.

The platform provides several integration options for different workflows. The Web Dashboard centralizes scans, report viewing, score trend tracking, and branded compliance PDF downloads. 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, failing the build when the score drops below a chosen threshold. An MCP Server allows scans from AI coding assistants, and an API client supports custom integrations. For ongoing risk management, the Pro tier adds scheduled rescans every 6 hours, daily, weekly, or monthly, diff detection across scans, email alerts rate-limited to 1 per hour per API, and HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks with auto-disable after 5 consecutive failures.