Introducing Levo’s Runtime API Protection Module for API Security

After months of rigorous testing in some of the world’s largest and most demanding enterprises, we’re excited to announce that Levo’s API Protection Module is now generally available.

With this launch, Levo.ai becomes the most comprehensive API Security Platform, delivering shift left, governance, vulnerability testing, and runtime security use cases through a comprehensive platform.

Powered by our eBPF-driven visibility modules, it redefines what runtime blocking, API WAFs, and next generation WAAP (Web Application and API Protection) mean for security teams, developer velocity, and most importantly, for software led business growth.

Traditional “blockers” force a tough choice: protect aggressively and risk breaking customer experiences, or run in log mode and leave your business exposed.

Levo’s API Protection Module ends that trade off.

It blocks real attacks with high precision, preserves the seamless experience your customers expect, and eliminates the hidden costs of off-box inspection and endless rule tuning.

Read on to discover how Levo’s Runtime API Protection enables your business: safeguarding revenue, ensuring compliance, and earning customer trust.

Why WAFs Fail APIs & How Levo’s Runtime API Protection Redefines API Security

Legacy WAFs are inefficient and counterproductive for modern API based applications. They add a lot of work to already overstretched security teams in tuning, debugging, and triaging, while not correspondingly reducing, containing, or preventing API risks.

The lack of trust in WAFs is so severe that only 47% of WAFs run in blocking mode.

The most common pain points with API-WAFs include high false positives and false negatives, increased latency, complex configuration requirements, alert fatigue, and incident noise. 

All of these are symptomatic of deeper issues: the lack of runtime visibility, accurate behavioral baselines, comprehensive coverage, and application context.

By directly addressing these root causes, Levo’s API Protection eliminates the very problems that undermine traditional WAF solutions.

1. Automatic API Discovery and Protection Without Configuration

Levo’s protection doesn’t require manual onboarding or gateway integration to begin safeguarding endpoints. 

Through its eBPF-based discovery engine, Levo automatically maps every API: internal, external, third-party, or partner-facing, no matter the traffic volume. 

This ensures protection is turned on for every API by default, eliminating blind spots from shadow or zombie endpoints. Because discovery is native to runtime, coverage remains dynamic as the environment evolves. 

For enterprises, this means peace of mind: every customer interaction and partner integration is secured by default, without extra engineering work.

2. Smarter SOC with Runtime API Protection: Fewer Incidents, No Lost Revenue

Because it captures both runtime system behavior and application-level data flow, it knows not only what was accessed but who did it, when, and how. This fusion of system and application context means protections are based on real behavior, not assumptions. So every alert, every block, every insight is driven by depth, not just surface-level metadata.

3.  Adaptive API Security That Evolves at Your Pace, Not Your Vendor’s

Every enforcement action taken by Levo is fully auditable: teams can see what was blocked, why, and how the system reached its decision. This is not “learning mode” guesswork, or silent rule inference. It's transparent, explainable protection logic. 

Analysts can review, tune, or override detections in real time using intuitive controls or APIs within minutes using Python and YAML rules. Levo gives teams control without the overhead of expert handholding or WAF babysitting, reducing the overall TCO and the manual overhead to a fraction.

4.  Runtime API Security That Doesn’t Break Deployment Velocity

Levo doesn’t solely rely on regex or generic threat signatures. It creates per-endpoint behavioral baselines derived from actual runtime traffic, sensitive data exposure, and user interaction patterns. 

This allows it to spot deviations that signify real threats: whether it’s a privilege escalation or lateral movement inside east-west traffic. 

This behavioral intelligence that matures with your stack, detecting nuanced misuse rather than chasing volume or thresholds.

Levo API Protection Module Capabilities and Features

OWASP API Top 10 & Custom Use‑Case Coverage

Out of the box, Levo includes detection for the OWASP API Top 10: mass assignment, broken object-level authorization, injection, and more. 

Engineers can extend coverage using Python, YAML, or Lua rules to codify emerging abuse patterns or business‑specific logic. 

This dual model: foundational best practices plus bespoke flexibility, ensures the platform adapts quickly as new threats emerge. It protects revenue and brand reputation by closing both the known gaps and the edge cases unique to your application.

Granular API Security Policies That Match Your Risk Tolerance

Security shouldn’t be one‑size‑fits‑all. Levo lets you define enforcement actions at the endpoint level and across environments, block the malicious call in production, log it in staging, or suppress a noisy pattern in test. 

Enterprises can embed organisation‑specific checks, such as custom header validation, correlation IDs, or regulatory compliance triggers, directly into the enforcement layer without redeploying services. 

This eliminates vendor lock‑in and allows you to tailor protection to unique business flows, saving integration time and operational costs.

This flexibility ensures that security measures align with business context: stringent where needed, invisible where not.

Guided Runtime Fixes That Resolve Root Causes of API Vulnerabilities

Blocking an exploit is only half the job. 

When Levo stops a threat, it traces the incident back to the vulnerable endpoint or missing check and, through the MCP server, surfaces remediation guidance, often including a patch snippet or configuration change. 

That means developers receive a clear “what, where and how” rather than a vague alert, shortening remediation time from months to hours and reducing the chance of the same bug reappearing.

Risk‑Aware API Security Policies for Sensitive Data Protection

Levo’s runtime visibility doesn’t just map endpoints, it classifies the data they handle. It automatically identifies APIs that touch PII, PHI or other regulated data and labels them as high‑risk. 

This allows security teams to set more aggressive enforcement or real‑time blocking on sensitive flows and ensure APIs or AI agents aren’t misusing customer information. 

For the business, that means fewer incidents involving crown‑jewel data, greater compliance assurance, and a stronger privacy narrative for customers and regulators.

API Risk Scoring & Adaptive Enforcement

Not every API is equal. Levo scores endpoints by risk, based on sensitivity, exposure, and observed attack patterns and automatically applies stricter rate limits or step‑up authentication on high‑risk APIs. 

This dynamic approach maximises protection where it matters while keeping friction low for routine interactions. It preserves performance, enhances user experience, and ensures that security resources are invested where the payoff is highest.

Self-Improving Runtime API Security Testing & Detection Feedback Loop

Every blocked exploit and anomaly becomes an opportunity to strengthen your posture. Levo can convert detected attacks into new pre‑production tests and also feed them into its detection and monitoring engine. This creates a virtuous cycle: coverage expands, baselines refine, signal quality improves, and alert fatigue diminishes. 

Over time, the platform learns from your environment, so security becomes both smarter and quieter, allowing your teams to focus on securing instead of triaging.

Microservice‑Level API Sidecar Protection: Scoped Control for Each Service

Levo doesn’t just sit at the gateway or host level. In Kubernetes and service‑mesh environments, it can be deployed as a sidecar alongside every microservice. 

This allows policies and rules to be scoped to a specific service, instead of forcing one monolithic rule set across all APIs. 

Teams can tailor enforcement for each microservice: tightening restrictions on sensitive services and relaxing them on internal ones, without re-routing traffic or introducing latency. 

For the business, this means easier adoption for teams moving to microservices, stronger lateral-security posture, and lower operational overhead compared to legacy WAFs that can’t reach inside the mesh.

Levo’s Privacy Preserving Security Architecture

Every Levo module is designed to be effective, lightweight, and aligned with business growth. Security shouldn’t compromise developer velocity, violate compliance, or inflate infrastructure costs.

The protection module follows the same principles. It avoids traffic mirroring, full payload ingestion, and costly inline deployments that strain production systems.

Our eBPF-based sensors, one of twenty available instrumentation methods, passively observe API traffic across environments, including encrypted flows.

This traffic is processed locally within the Levo Satellite, which can be self-hosted or deployed instantly across environments. 

After analysis, the traces are discarded.

Only sanitized metadata and OpenAPI specifications are sent to the cloud from your production environments. No raw payloads, no sensitive fields, and nothing that violates data residency requirements.

Because analysis and enforcement are handled entirely within your infrastructure, there’s no round-trip to an external SaaS for decision-making. This keeps latency near zero, unlike legacy vendors that mirror traffic to the cloud before taking action.

This model makes real-time protection viable for highly regulated sectors while also reducing egress costs and simplifying operational adoption.

Book a demo through this link to see this live in action!