APIsec for CISOs
What middleBrick covers
- Black-box API scanning with a sub-minute scan time
- Risk scoring with prioritized findings and remediation guidance
- Mapping findings to PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and OWASP API Top 10
- Authenticated scanning with header allowlist and domain verification
- LLM adversarial probe testing across multiple tiers
- OpenAPI spec parsing and runtime correlation
Executive Summary for CISOs
This tool provides continuous, low-friction visibility into API risk without requiring code changes or deployment of agents. It returns a standardized risk score and prioritized findings that map to major security frameworks, enabling governance and oversight while fitting into existing tooling and workflows.
How It Integrates Into Security Workflows
Designed for consumption by security and engineering teams, the scanner operates as a self-service capability. With scan times under one minute, it supports on-demand checks during design reviews, pre-deployment gates, and periodic reassessments. Results are surfaced through a web dashboard, CLI, and automation-friendly interfaces, allowing CISOs to establish consistent review cadres across services.
- Run scans from the CLI with a single command to validate endpoints before promotion.
- Embed checks in CI/CD pipelines to block merges when risk exceeds defined thresholds.
- Schedule recurring scans to monitor for drift and newly introduced misconfigurations.
Authenticated scanning supports Bearer tokens, API keys, Basic auth, and cookies, with domain verification to ensure only domain owners can submit credentials.
Risk Assessment and Reporting
The scanner produces a letter-grade risk score and a prioritized list of findings, reducing cognitive load for security teams. Each finding includes context, severity indicators, and remediation guidance. Reports can be downloaded as branded PDFs to support audit and review activities.
Findings align with three core frameworks:
- PCI-DSS 4.0
- SOC 2 Type II
- OWASP API Top 10 (2023)
For other security and privacy regimes, the tool supports audit evidence collection and helps you prepare for evaluation by surfacing relevant control observations. It does not certify compliance or guarantee adherence to any regulatory framework.
Capabilities and Detection Scope
The scanner performs black-box assessments using read-only methods, ensuring no destructive operations are executed. Coverage includes twelve security categories, with specific tests for authentication bypass, broken object level authorization, insecure direct object references, privilege escalation, data exposure, injection risks, and server-side request forgery.
LLM-specific testing is included, with multiple adversarial probe tiers that examine system prompt extraction, instruction override, data exfiltration attempts, and model abuse vectors. OpenAPI specifications are parsed and reconciled with runtime behavior, highlighting undefined security schemes and deprecated operations.
Operational Boundaries and Limitations
Because the approach is non-intrusive, the tool does not perform active exploitation such as SQL injection or command injection testing. It does not detect business logic flaws that require domain-specific understanding, nor does it probe for blind SSRF using out-of-band channels.
Findings should be correlated with additional testing methodologies and professional assessments when evaluating high-risk environments. The scanner does not replace manual pentesting for critical assets.
Customer data is deletable on demand and retained only as long as necessary to operate the service. No scan data is used for training or shared with third parties.