Alternatives to Bright Security at Seed-stage startups

middleBrick is a self-service API security scanner that operates as a black-box solution. You submit a target URL and receive a risk score with prioritized findings, without installing agents, accessing source code, or integrating an SDK. The scanner supports any language, framework, or cloud stack because it observes behavior from the network rather than inspecting internals. Scan completion typically occurs in under a minute, using read-only methods such as GET and HEAD, with text-only POST reserved for LLM probes. This approach suits seed-stage startups that lack instrumentation pipelines and want immediate visibility into external-facing API risks.

The scanner evaluates 12 security categories aligned to OWASP API Top 10 (2023). These include Authentication issues such as multi-method bypass and JWT misconfigurations, Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA) and IDOR via sequential ID enumeration, Broken Function Level Authorization (BFLA) and privilege escalation attempts, and Property Authorization over-exposure. It also covers Input Validation like CORS wildcard usage and dangerous HTTP methods, Rate Limiting and Resource Consumption indicators, Data Exposure patterns including PII and API key formats, Encryption misconfigurations, SSRF indicators, Inventory Management gaps, and unsafe consumption surfaces. An additional category addresses LLM / AI Security through adversarial probes spanning multiple tiers.

middleBrick parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 documents with recursive $ref resolution and cross-references spec definitions against runtime observations. This can highlight undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination. For authenticated scanning, supported methods include Bearer tokens, API keys, Basic auth, and cookies. Domain verification is enforced through DNS TXT records or HTTP well-known files, ensuring only the domain owner can run credentialed scans. The scanner forwards a restricted allowlist of headers to limit exposure during testing.

With Pro tier and above, the platform provides scheduled rescans at intervals of six hours, daily, weekly, or monthly, and tracks score drift by diffing findings across runs. Email alerts are rate-limited to one per hour per API, and webhooks are HMAC-SHA256 signed with auto-disable after five consecutive failures. The tool integrates into existing workflows via a Web Dashboard for reporting and trend analysis, a CLI (middlebrick scan <url>) with JSON or text output, a GitHub Action that can fail CI/CD builds based on score thresholds, and an MCP Server for use with AI coding assistants. An API client enables custom integrations for teams with specific pipelines.

The scanner is designed with a read-only safety posture; destructive payloads are never sent, and private IPs, localhost, and cloud metadata endpoints are blocked at multiple layers. Customer scan data is deletable on demand and purged within 30 days of cancellation, and it is never sold or used for model training. middleBrick maps findings to PCI-DSS 4.0, SOC 2 Type II, and OWASP API Top 10 (2023), helping you prepare for audits and aligning with security controls described in other frameworks without claiming certification or compliance guarantees.