In today’s API-first world, security isn’t optional — it’s mission-critical. Engineering teams are shipping faster than ever, but with rapidly growing API surfaces and evolving attack vectors, manual penetration testing has become too slow, too expensive, and too rare. Qodex.ai’s Penetration Testing Agent solves this. With one prompt, Qodex runs a full suite of automated penetration tests across your APIs — identifying real vulnerabilities, simulating attacker behavior, and giving your team actionable insights in minutes.

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What Is API Penetration Testing?

API penetration testing is the controlled simulation of attacks against your endpoints — designed to expose misconfigurations, broken access logic, insecure data exposure, and injection points before malicious actors do. With Qodex, all of this happens automatically. You just type:
“Generate penetration tests for my login and payment flow”
Qodex analyzes your collection and instantly creates dozens of real-world attack scenarios — chaining APIs, modifying tokens, injecting payloads, and pushing your system to its limits.

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What Types of Penetration Tests Can Qodex Run?

  1. Broken Object Level Authorization (BOLA) APIs that expose object IDs (e.g., /user/123) are vulnerable if access isn’t properly validated. ✓ Qodex tests unauthorized access attempts across IDs, ownership, and roles.
  2. Broken User Authentication From missing token checks to predictable session IDs, weak authentication is a goldmine for attackers. ✓ Qodex simulates hijacked sessions, expired tokens, and invalid JWTs.
  3. Excessive Data Exposure APIs often return more than needed like internal flags, user metadata, or payment details. ✓ Qodex runs fuzzed requests and inspects verbose API responses for leaks.
  4. Lack of Resources & Rate Limiting Brute-force login attempts or massive payload loops can crash your backend if throttling is weak. ✓ Qodex floods endpoints to test rate limits and DoS exposure.
  5. Broken Function Level Authorization Privileged actions (like DELETE /user) should be tightly restricted. ✓ Qodex tests role bypasses and permission escalations across function-level APIs.
  6. Mass Assignment If a payload like is blindly accepted, attackers can hijack user roles. ✓ Qodex probes API schemas for unsafe auto-binding and overrides.
  7. Security Misconfiguration Open ports, verbose errors, and bad CORS policies can expose attack surfaces. ✓ Qodex scans endpoints for improper headers, detailed stack traces, and insecure settings.
  8. Injection Attacks SQL, XML, or command injections are still common in poorly validated APIs. ✓ Qodex crafts malicious inputs to test for injection vulnerabilities.
  9. Improper Asset Management Old, forgotten API versions or undocumented endpoints can act as backdoors. ✓ Qodex crawls exposed endpoints and flags deprecated or unsecured versions.
  10. Insufficient Logging & Monitoring Attacks mean little if you can’t detect them. ✓ Qodex includes tests to simulate anomalies and check if your API reports/logs them properly.

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Real-World Use Cases

  • Fintech Login Flow: Qodex flagged missing token expiry checks, enabling hijack attempts.
  • Healthcare APIs: Mass assignment vulnerability exposed admin-level properties.
  • E-commerce: Detected rate limit gaps in coupon application API.