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Show HN: Quickly Create Security Tests for All Your APIs (YC S21)
15 points by ashekhawat 1236 days ago
Hey everyone, excited to share something we’ve been working on the last few months! For context, Metlo is an open source API Security tool[0] we launched here on HN a couple months ago[1].

After working with a few customers over the last couple months, we realized there was a gap in other API testing solutions; especially when it comes to writing security tests. So we decided to completely gut and revamp our testing product - sharing that with you all today!

Most Automated API Scanners only find generic vulnerabilities like misconfigured HSTS/CORS Headers and miss vulns specific to your API’s business logic. Making custom tests in tools like Postman (which we love) requires you to manually write tests for every single endpoint. This is quite tedious and time consuming if you have hundreds or thousands of endpoints.

So we decided to make the API Security testing experience much faster and more seamless:

* With Metlo testing, you can write API tests in a YAML format (https://docs.metlo.com/docs/writing-a-test).

* To make writing tests fast, Metlo supports autogenerating these tests with javascript templates (https://docs.metlo.com/docs/example-templates). Templates for common vulnerabilities in the OWASP Top 10 like BOLA, Broken Authentication, Security Misconfigurations and more come built-in to Metlo. You can also make custom templates that are specific to your API.

* Once you have the right templates you can build rules to apply these templates to many endpoints at once (https://docs.metlo.com/docs/test-rules). This makes it possible to write hundreds of tests against your API in just a few clicks :)

We have more info on our docs here: https://docs.metlo.com/docs/writing-a-test. And here's a demo video if you’d like a quick walk-through :) https://www.loom.com/share/f342f186e756489aa7a500be875a5539

We’d love to hear your thoughts!

[0] https://github.com/metlo-labs/metlo [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33534856

2 comments

Can tests be created automatically based on captured API traffic? Also, I have heard a bit about, but not read in detail about Nuclei: https://nuclei.projectdiscovery.io/templating-guide/. How does this compare with your solution?
Hey! Yes tests can automatically be created based on the API traffic Metlo captures. Thats also the main difference between Metlo and Nuclei… we autogenerate tests based on the API schemas discovered for common vulns. You can also customize test generation using our templates!
Other co-founder of Metlo here.

We'll keep checking in here to answer questions for the rest of the day. Excited to hear what you think!