Akto API Security: Inventory, Test, and Protect REST APIs

Modern applications expose hundreds of API endpoints across microservices, mobile backends, and third-party integrations. Security teams struggle to maintain accurate API inventories when engineering moves fast, endpoints shift across deployments, and shadow APIs accumulate without documentation. Akto is an open-source API security platform that ingests real traffic data to automatically build living API inventories, detect vulnerabilities, and run continuous tests inside CI/CD pipelines.

Unlike conventional DAST scanners that depend on static OpenAPI specifications, Akto learns endpoint behavior from actual production traffic patterns. This context-awareness reduces false positives and exposes undocumented routes that traditional tools miss entirely. You can review source code, deployment configurations, and test templates on the official Akto GitHub repository.

How Akto Builds a Continuous API Inventory

Accurate API security depends on knowing every exposed endpoint. Static documentation drifts out of sync with production deployments within weeks of any significant refactor. Akto bypasses this problem by reading live traffic.

Traffic ingestion connectors pull request and response data from multiple sources simultaneously. Each new request pattern Akto observes gets added to the inventory automatically, including endpoints missing from your official Swagger documentation.

Every ingested endpoint gets classified by authentication status, HTTP method, parameter types, and response schema. Akto flags unauthenticated endpoints, those returning sensitive data fields, and routes that have never appeared in your OpenAPI specification as shadow APIs.

Testing APIs Against OWASP Top 10 and HackerOne Categories

Akto ships with over 1,000 pre-built test templates covering the full OWASP API Security Top 10, HackerOne Top 10, and SANS Top 25 vulnerability categories. These run against your live inventory rather than static mock environments.

BOLA Testing: Broken Object Level Authorization

BOLA remains the top-ranked vulnerability across the OWASP API list. Exploits occur when an API accepts object identifiers from authenticated users without verifying whether the requester owns that specific object.

Akto’s BOLA tests automatically substitute object IDs in live traffic captures, then replay those requests using alternate attacker tokens from secondary test accounts. A data leak across accounts confirms the authorization control failure.

# Example attack pattern Akto automates for BOLA detection
GET /api/orders/8823
Authorization: Bearer attacker_token_here

# Expected: 403 Forbidden
# Vulnerable response: 200 OK with victim's order data

SSRF, Authentication, and Security Misconfiguration Tests

Server-Side Request Forgery tests inject attacker-controlled URLs into request parameters and monitor for outbound DNS lookups or HTTP callbacks reaching external listener infrastructure. Authentication tests verify token expiry enforcement, JWT algorithm confusion susceptibility, and broken authentication flows. Security misconfiguration checks identify exposed debug endpoints, verbose error messages leaking stack traces, and missing rate limiting controls.

Deploying Akto and Connecting Traffic Sources

Akto runs as a Docker stack. The platform starts in under 60 seconds on a machine with Docker Compose installed.

# Clone the repository and start Akto with Docker Compose
git clone https://github.com/akto-api-security/akto
cd akto
docker-compose up -d

The web dashboard launches at http://localhost:9090 by default. First-run setup guides you through creating an admin account and connecting your first traffic source. Burp Suite integration requires installing the Akto plugin from the BApp store, which forwards intercepted traffic automatically without manual export steps.

Running Tests Inside CI/CD Pipelines

Embedding API security tests into GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins prevents vulnerable endpoints from reaching production. Akto exposes a REST API that your pipeline can call to trigger test suites against staging environments after each deployment.

# Trigger an Akto test run via API from a CI step
curl -X POST "http://your-akto-instance:9090/api/startTest" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AKTO_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "testCollectionId": "your-collection-id",
    "testIds": ["BOLA", "SSRF", "AUTH_BYPASS"]
  }'

Test results return structured JSON with severity ratings, affected endpoints, reproduction steps, and remediation guidance. Integrate these outputs with your team’s vulnerability tracking system to link findings directly to pull requests. Teams that already use Nmap for network surface mapping find Akto covers the complementary application-layer API surface that port scanning cannot reach.