Best alternative to Escape
What middleBrick covers
- Black-box API scanning with under one minute runtime
- Risk score from A to F with prioritized findings
- 12 OWASP API Top 10 (2023) detection categories
- OpenAPI 3.0/3.1 and Swagger 2.0 parsing with $ref resolution
- Authenticated scanning with strict header allowlist
- CI/CD integrations including GitHub Actions and MCP Server
Overview and positioning
When evaluating an API security scanner as an alternative to a solution such as Escape, prioritize continuous black-box coverage and verifiable risk scoring. middleBrick is a self-service scanner that submits a URL and receives a risk score from A to F with prioritized findings. It uses read-only HTTP methods, requires no agents or SDK integration, and completes a scan in under one minute. This approach suits teams that need fast, repeatable assessments across multiple environments without changing deployment pipelines.
Detection breadth and methodology
middleBrick detects findings across 12 categories aligned to the OWASP API Top 10 (2023), covering authentication bypass, JWT misconfigurations, BOLA and IDOR, BFLA and privilege escalation, property authorization, input validation, rate limiting, data exposure, encryption, SSRF, inventory management, and LLM/AI security. For API specifications, it parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 with recursive $ref resolution and cross-references spec definitions against runtime behavior to identify undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination. The scanner never executes destructive payloads and blocks private IPs, localhost, and cloud metadata endpoints at multiple layers.
Authenticated scanning and safe exposure controls
Authenticated scanning is available from the Starter tier onward, supporting Bearer, API key, Basic auth, and Cookie credentials. Domain verification is enforced through a DNS TXT record or an HTTP well-known file to ensure only the domain owner can scan with credentials. The scanner forwards a strict header allowlist limited to Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-* headers. All scan data is deletable on demand and purged within 30 days of cancellation, and customer data is never used for model training.
Compliance mapping and integrations
middleBrick maps findings directly to PCI-DSS 4.0, SOC 2 Type II, and OWASP API Top 10 (2023), and it supports audit evidence for other frameworks through alignment language such as helps you prepare for and aligns with security controls described in. The product integrates via a Web Dashboard for reporting and score trends, a CLI with JSON or text output, a GitHub Action that can fail builds based on score thresholds, an MCP Server for AI coding assistants, and an API client for custom workflows. Continuous monitoring in Pro tier provides scheduled rescans, diff detection, email alerts rate-limited to one per hour per API, and HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks with auto-disable after five consecutive failures.
LLM and AI security coverage
The scanner includes specific coverage for LLM and AI security with 18 adversarial probes across Quick, Standard, and Deep scan tiers. These probes test system prompt extraction, instruction override, DAN and roleplay jailbreaks, data exfiltration, cost exploitation, encoding bypasses such as base64 and ROT13, translation-embedded injection, few-shot poisoning, markdown injection, multi-turn manipulation, indirect prompt injection, token smuggling, tool abuse, nested instruction injection, and PII extraction. This helps identify prompt handling weaknesses without executing intrusive attacks.