Best alternative to Protect AI

middleBrick serves as a direct alternative to Protect AI for teams that prioritize black-box scanning with minimal integration burden. It submits a URL and receives a risk score from A to F along with prioritized findings, using read-only methods only. The scanner completes in under a minute and supports any language, framework, or cloud without agents, SDKs, or code access.

middleBrick maps findings to three core frameworks: OWASP API Top 10 (2023), PCI-DSS 4.0, and SOC 2 Type II. Within OWASP API Top 10, it covers authentication bypass, JWT misconfigurations, BOLA and IDOR, BFLA and privilege escalation, property authorization over-exposure, input validation issues like CORS misconfigurations and dangerous methods, rate limiting and resource consumption indicators, data exposure including PII and API key leakage, encryption and header misconfigurations, SSRF probes where applicable, inventory and versioning issues, unsafe consumption surfaces, and LLM/AI security probes. For PCI-DSS 4.0 and SOC 2 Type II, findings map to specific controls and provide audit evidence, though the tool does not certify compliance.

It does not perform intrusive exploit validation such as active SQL injection or command injection, nor does it detect business logic flaws or blind SSRF that require out-of-band infrastructure. These limitations are documented so teams can plan complementary manual or specialist testing.

Authenticated scanning is available from Starter tier onward, supporting Bearer tokens, API keys, Basic auth, and cookies. Domain verification is enforced through DNS TXT records or an HTTP well-known file, ensuring only domain owners can scan with credentials. The scanner only forwards a strict allowlist of headers and uses read-only methods, with destructive payloads never sent. Private IPs, localhost, and cloud metadata endpoints are blocked at multiple layers, and customer data is deletable on demand and never used for model training.

OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 specs are parsed with recursive $ref resolution, and findings are cross-referenced against the spec to highlight undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination details.

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 builds when scores drop below a configurable threshold. An MCP Server allows scanning from AI coding assistants, and a programmatic API client supports custom integrations. Pro tier adds scheduled rescans, diff detection across scans, email alerts rate-limited to one per hour per API, HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks with auto-disable after five consecutive failures, and Slack or Teams notifications. Enterprise tier provides unlimited APIs, custom rules, SSO, audit logs, an SLA, and dedicated support.

LLM/AI security is evaluated through 18 adversarial probes across three scan tiers: Quick, Standard, and Deep. These include system prompt extraction, instruction override attempts, DAN and roleplay jailbreaks, data exfiltration probes, cost exploitation techniques, base64 and ROT13 encoding bypasses, translation-embedded injection, few-shot poisoning, markdown injection, multi-turn manipulation, indirect prompt injection, token smuggling, tool-abuse patterns, nested instruction injection, and PII extraction attempts. This coverage helps teams surface risks specific to AI-facing endpoints and agentic workflows.