Alternatives to Astra in Healthcare
What middleBrick covers
- Black-box scanning with no agents or code access
- Read-only methods: GET and HEAD, text-only POST
- 12 categories aligned to OWASP API Top 10 (2023)
- OpenAPI 3.0/3.1 and Swagger 2.0 parsing with ref resolution
- Authenticated scanning with header allowlist
- Continuous monitoring with diff and alerting
Purpose and scope for healthcare API security assessment
Healthcare environments aggregate sensitive data across internal and external APIs. The scanner is designed to profile the external attack surface of API endpoints without requiring code access or agents. It operates as a read-only black-box scanner, limiting methods to GET and HEAD, plus text-only POST for LLM probes. The tool maps findings to three frameworks, including OWASP API Top 10 (2023), and supports audit evidence for security reviews.
Detection coverage aligned to healthcare threat models
The scanner covers 12 categories relevant to healthcare APIs and common integration patterns. Detection capabilities include authentication bypass and JWT misconfigurations, broken object level authorization and IDOR patterns, privilege escalation attempts, and over-exposed data fields. It identifies sensitive data exposure such as email, card Luhn patterns, context-aware SSN values, and API key formats. Additional coverage includes CORS misconfigurations, dangerous HTTP methods, rate-limit behavior, SSRF indicators, and server fingerprinting. For AI-facing endpoints, it runs 18 adversarial probes across three scan tiers targeting prompt injection, data exfiltration, and token smuggling.
- Authentication and security header compliance
- BOLA and IDOR via sequential and adjacent ID probing
- BFLA and privilege escalation attempts
- Property over-exposure and mass-assignment surface
- Input validation and dangerous methods
- Rate limits and oversized responses
- Data exposure including PII and API keys
- Encryption, redirect, and cookie settings
- SSRF in URL and body parameters
- Inventory issues such as missing versioning
- Unsafe consumption and webhook surface
- LLM adversarial probes across tiers
OpenAPI analysis and integration considerations
The scanner parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 documents with recursive $ref resolution. It cross-references spec definitions against runtime behavior to surface undefined security schemes, deprecated operations, and missing pagination. This helps validate that documented interfaces align with actual behavior, which is valuable when assessing integration points common in healthcare systems. The tool does not perform intrusive payload testing such as active SQL injection or command injection.
Authenticated scanning and data handling policies
Authenticated scanning supports Bearer, API key, Basic auth, and Cookie methods. Domain verification is enforced through DNS TXT records or an HTTP well-known file to ensure only domain owners can scan with credentials. Forwarded headers are limited to Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-* headers. Scan data is deletable on demand and purged within 30 days of cancellation. Customer data is never sold or used for model training.
Product options and continuous monitoring
The Web Dashboard centralizes scans, report viewing, and score trend tracking, with the option to download branded compliance PDFs. The CLI allows commands such as middlebrick scan <url> with JSON or text output. The GitHub Action can gate CI/CD, failing the build when scores drop below a set threshold. The MCP Server enables scanning from AI coding assistants. The Pro tier adds scheduled rescans every 6 hours, daily, weekly, or monthly, diff detection across scans, email alerts at rate-limited intervals, HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks, and Slack or Teams notifications.