Manual API penetration testing for authorization, authentication, business logic, and data exposure flaws that automated scanners routinely miss.
EXPERT-LED · MANUAL VALIDATION
APIs concentrate identity, authorization, and sensitive business actions behind endpoints that often look safe to a conventional scanner. This assessment combines endpoint discovery, role-aware testing, manual request manipulation, and controlled exploitation to show which weaknesses have real business impact.
HOW THE TESTING FEELS IN PRACTICE
Automation gives coverage. The findings that matter come from someone chaining weak controls together, questioning assumptions, and checking what a motivated attacker could reach next.
ASSESSMENT COVERAGE
Coverage is finalized during scoping, then tested with a mix of systematic checks and manual attack-path analysis.
Map documented and observed endpoints, versions, methods, parameters, content types, and trust boundaries. Compare OpenAPI or Postman definitions with live behavior to find shadow, legacy, and inconsistently protected routes.
Test login, API keys, JWT validation, OAuth flows, refresh tokens, session expiry, account recovery, MFA boundaries, token replay, and the separation between user, service, and administrator identities.
Test BOLA, BFLA, tenant isolation, role transitions, predictable identifiers, bulk operations, nested resources, and indirect references. The goal is to prove whether one identity can read or change another user's data.
Challenge state transitions, ordering assumptions, coupon and payment logic, race conditions, replay protections, approval steps, negative values, quantity limits, and multi-request chains that do not match a simple vulnerability signature.
Check injection paths, mass assignment, unsafe deserialization, SSRF, file handling, excessive data exposure, verbose errors, webhooks, GraphQL query controls, and downstream service trust.
Review rate limiting by identity and action, pagination, resource consumption, expensive GraphQL queries, asynchronous jobs, brute-force resistance, enumeration signals, and protections against automated abuse.
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT FIRST
Every phase is designed to produce defensible evidence without taking unnecessary operational risk.
Agree environments, credentials, roles, excluded actions, data handling, testing windows, and escalation contacts before traffic is sent.
Build a role matrix and trace sensitive objects and actions across clients, gateways, services, queues, and third-party integrations.
Import available documentation, observe application traffic, enumerate behavior safely, and establish expected responses for each role.
Manipulate identifiers, claims, methods, headers, content types, sequences, and concurrency. Automated tools support coverage but do not replace manual validation.
Reproduce findings with the minimum safe proof needed to establish exploitability. Stop conditions protect production data and service availability.
Deliver evidence, risk context, root cause, and implementation-focused remediation. One retest round validates agreed fixes and updates finding status.
ACTIONABLE OUTPUTS
The report is written for two audiences: stakeholders who need a clear risk decision and engineers who need enough detail to reproduce and fix the issue.
COMMON SCOPING QUESTIONS
A base URL, available OpenAPI or Postman documentation, representative accounts for each role, the intended authorization model, and a contact who can answer workflow questions. Documentation helps coverage but is not mandatory.
Yes. Mobile traffic can be proxied and mapped, then the backend API is tested independently for authorization, authentication, data exposure, and workflow flaws. Mobile binary testing can be scoped separately when needed.
They can flag simple identifier changes, but reliable testing needs multiple identities, an expected access model, and manual reasoning across request sequences. That is why manual authorization and workflow testing is central to this service.
The rules of engagement define safe actions, rate limits, test accounts, and stop conditions. High-risk availability tests are excluded or moved to staging unless you explicitly approve a controlled production test.
Yes. One retest round is included for validated findings fixed within the agreed retest window. The updated report records whether each issue is closed, partially fixed, or still reproducible.
CLEAR SCOPE · CONTROLLED TESTING · USEFUL REPORT
Share the target, environment, roles, and objective. The service field is already selected so you can send the right context quickly.
TELL US ABOUT YOUR SCOPE
Share a few details about the target and your goals. We will reply with the right testing approach and a clear proposal.
Protected against automated submissions. Only submit systems you own or are authorized to test. Do not include passwords, API keys, or other secrets.