Launch HN: Metlo (YC S21) – Open-source software for securing your APIs

My biggest issue with most fuzzing tools has always been the high rate of false positives. When I worked at Uber, we intentionally never exposed these tools to dev teams because it was too "noisy" to bother with. Most of the alerts were false positives 90%+ of the time and we eventually ignored them (even though were the security team).

How do you avoid that alert fatigue trap? Do you have a plan to ensure a high signal-to-noise ratio?

1) We're a bit different from a standard fuzzing tool, instead of generating traffic to send to an API we find vulnerabilities by analyzing real production/staging traffic. This gives our models a better understanding of how the API actually works. Although we might add a fuzzer at some point!

2) We split out very high signal vulns (https://demo.metlo.com/vulnerabilities) from vulns/attacks that we detect with our ML models that may have some false positives (https://demo.metlo.com/protection)... Different classifications give you a better way to triage any alerts.

3) We're putting a lot of effort into making our models really good, we're not comfortable with our tool having high false positive rates so when there's a model that is returning 90%+ false positives were aware of that and don't even add it :)

Thanks for the feedback and playing devils advocate!

Any security tool that helps devs has to go to market through opensource in my opinion.