API security for Solo founders
What middleBrick covers
- Black-box API scanning with under one minute scan time
- Risk scoring from A to F with prioritized findings
- Authenticated scans with strict header allowlist
- LLM adversarial probes for AI security testing
- OpenAPI 3.0/3.1 and Swagger 2.0 parsing with diff tracking
- Continuous monitoring and compliance mapping to PCI-DSS 4.0, SOC 2 Type II, and OWASP API Top 10
Why API security matters for solo founders
As a solo founder, your API is often the product surface and the primary customer interaction channel. A single exposed field or misconfigured header can leak data, enable unauthorized access, or erode user trust. You need visibility into your public endpoints without diverting engineering time from building features. This scanner surfaces concrete risk findings mapped to OWASP API Top 10 (2023) to help you understand what an attacker can see when probing your APIs.
Black-box scanning approach and constraints
middleBrick is a black-box scanner that requires no agents, SDKs, or code access. It sends read-only methods (GET and HEAD) plus text-only POST for LLM probes and completes most scans in under a minute. Because it does not execute destructive payloads, it will not alter data or disrupt production traffic. The tool does not perform active SQL injection or command injection testing, does not detect business logic flaws that require deep domain knowledge, and cannot identify blind SSRF without out-of-band infrastructure. Treat its output as evidence to guide manual review, not as a replacement for a human pentester on high-stakes audits.
Authenticated scanning and safe header handling
With Starter tier and above, you can add authentication so the scanner exercises authenticated flows using Bearer tokens, API keys, Basic auth, or cookies. Before scanning, domain verification is enforced through a DNS TXT record or an HTTP well-known file to ensure only the domain owner can run credentialed scans. The scanner forwards a strict allowlist of headers: Authorization, X-API-Key, Cookie, and X-Custom-* headers. This keeps credential exposure minimal while still validating that authenticated endpoints do not leak sensitive information or expose excessive fields.
Findings, compliance mapping, and monitoring
Each scan produces a risk score from A to F and a prioritized list of findings aligned to three frameworks: PCI-DSS 4.0, SOC 2 Type II, and OWASP API Top 10 (2023). For other regulations, the tool supports audit evidence collection and helps you prepare for security controls described in frameworks such as ISO 27001 or NIST, but it does not certify compliance. With Pro tier, you can enable continuous monitoring with scheduled rescans every 6 hours, daily, weekly, or monthly. The system provides diff detection across scans, email alerts limited to 1 per hour per API, and HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks that auto-disable after 5 consecutive failures.
LLM security and OpenAPI analysis
The scanner includes specific checks for LLM/AI Security, running 18 adversarial probes across Quick, Standard, and Deep tiers. These probes test for system prompt extraction, instruction override attempts, DAN and roleplay jailbreaks, data exfiltration, token smuggling, and other model manipulation techniques. For API contracts, it parses OpenAPI 3.0, 3.1, and Swagger 2.0 with recursive $ref resolution and cross-references spec definitions against runtime behavior to highlight undefined security schemes, sensitive fields, deprecated operations, and missing pagination.