Top 5 runtime security tools for app protection in 2026

Key takeaways

• Runtime security tools protect production environments by monitoring what’s actually happening – inside containers, workloads, and cloud infrastructure – once your applications are deployed and running.
• Most operate at the infrastructure layer: watching containers, hosts, and network traffic for anomalous behavior using eBPF-based monitoring. This is valuable, but it answers only part of the question.
• Infrastructure runtime monitoring tells you that something suspicious happened inside a container. It can’t tell you whether the application’s own logic, APIs, and endpoints are exploitable by an attacker.
• To check if your apps are exploitable at runtime, you need dynamic application security testing (DAST) – which is the layer that many runtime security programs are missing.
• This article covers four widely used runtime security platforms (Wiz, Aqua Security, Sysdig Secure, and Falco), explains where each plays and what it can’t see, and explains how Invicti DAST with proof-based scanning fills the application-layer gap they leave.

What runtime security actually covers

Runtime security means different things in different parts of the market, and the distinction matters when you’re evaluating tools:

• In cloud infrastructure, runtime security refers to monitoring workloads – containers, Kubernetes pods, virtual machines – for suspicious behavior while they’re running in production. eBPF-based agents observe kernel-level activity without modifying workloads and have become sophisticated enough to detect reverse shells, privilege escalation attempts, unexpected process execution, and anomalous network connections in real time.
• In application security, the “runtime” label commonly refers to testing the running application itself – its web interfaces, APIs, authentication flows, and business logic – against real attack patterns to find exploitable vulnerabilities. This is the domain of dynamic application security testing (DAST).

Both layers matter, but they’re often treated as if they’re the same problem, which is how many organizations end up with strong infrastructure monitoring and no visibility into whether the applications running inside that infrastructure are actually exploitable.

The infrastructure-level runtime view: What it sees and what it misses

eBPF-based runtime tools give you a view inside your production workloads that static analysis and image scanning can’t provide. A container image can be clean at build time and compromised within seconds of deployment via a supply-chain attack, a vulnerable dependency, or malicious code introduced after scanning. Runtime monitoring catches what image scanning misses because it watches what’s actually executing.

What infrastructure-layer monitoring is good at:

• Detecting anomalous process behavior: unexpected shell spawning, file access outside defined paths, privilege escalation attempts
• Network-level visibility: connections to unexpected external hosts, east-west lateral movement between pods
• Container and host integrity: detecting drift from a known-good baseline, catching dropped binaries or modified system files
• Compliance and forensics: providing an audit trail of kernel-level events that reconstructs what happened during an incident

What infrastructure-layer monitoring can’t see:

• Whether the application’s login endpoint allows authentication bypass
• Whether an API parameter accepts SQL injection
• Whether a session management implementation is insecure
• Whether a business logic flaw lets a lower-privileged user access data they shouldn’t

These aren’t infrastructure problems but application problems, and no amount of syscall monitoring will surface them. Infrastructure runtime tools detect anomalous behavior based on how a workload acts; they have no model of how the application is supposed to behave in response to crafted inputs. A perfectly configured, alert-free infrastructure runtime environment can still be running an application with exploitable vulnerabilities in its APIs or business logic.

The five tools, and where each plays

Wiz

Wiz is a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) built on an agentless, API-first architecture. Rather than deploying agents on hosts, it connects to cloud accounts via API and builds a Security Graph – a unified model of relationships between cloud resources, workloads, identities, misconfigurations, and exposed data. This lets it surface attack paths that link an exposed resource to a critical asset, so teams can focus on configurations that actually represent risk rather than working through a flat findings list. An optional eBPF-based Runtime Sensor adds real-time in-container detection for workloads where agentless coverage isn’t sufficient.

Wiz is suitable for organizations that need broad multi-cloud visibility quickly, with priority on agentless deployment and attack-path risk prioritization. What it can’t do is test the application running inside those workloads – whether its APIs and endpoints are exploitable.

Aqua Security

Aqua Security has specialized in container and Kubernetes security since 2015, and its runtime protection model reflects that focus. Where many agentless platforms observe and report, Aqua places emphasis on active enforcement: its agent-based runtime protection uses eBPF to block unauthorized actions – dropped binaries, unexpected network connections, privilege escalations – before they complete, rather than alerting after the fact. It supports both agent-based and agentless deployment, with the agent-based mode providing the inline enforcement that distinguishes it from detection-only approaches.

That enforcement depth makes it suitable for enterprises with heavy Kubernetes deployments that need to stop threats in production, not just record them. Like the rest of this category, though, it has no mechanism for testing whether the application itself accepts malicious input through its APIs or forms.

Sysdig Secure

Sysdig Secure is a CNAPP built on top of Falco – the open-source runtime security engine that Sysdig originally created and donated to the CNCF. The platform extends Falco’s eBPF-based syscall monitoring with Kubernetes context, so instead of “Unknown process executed,” an alert reads “Process X ran in pod Y in namespace Z, and that’s anomalous for this workload.” That context is what separates actionable detections from noise, and it’s what makes Sysdig particularly well suited to incident reconstruction and forensic investigation across Kubernetes environments.

Sysdig can tell you a shell was spawned inside a container. It can’t tell you whether the API that enabled the compromise was exploitable from the outside before the incident happened.

Falco

Falco is worth understanding as its own entry because it’s the open-source foundation that shaped most of this category. Created by Sysdig, donated to the CNCF in 2018, and now a graduated project, it functions as the detection engine inside Sysdig Secure and as the reference implementation for eBPF-based runtime security in Kubernetes more broadly. It monitors kernel-level syscalls and fires alerts when behavior matches a defined rule – a container spawning a shell, a process writing to a sensitive path, unexpected network activity.

Falco is detection-only: it emits events rather than blocking, and in-kernel enforcement requires additional tooling or a commercial platform layered on top. It carries no licensing cost, which lowers the barrier to entry significantly, but operating it well at scale requires sustained engineering investment in rule tuning, SIEM integration, and alert triage. Teams choosing Falco directly are typically those with strong Kubernetes expertise and the capacity to build the operational layer themselves. Like all the tools in this category, it has no visibility into whether the applications running on those monitored hosts are actually exploitable.

Invicti – Runtime testing in the application layer

Invicti operates at the layer that the four tools above don’t reach: the application itself. Where Wiz, Aqua, Sysdig, and Falco watch how workloads behave at the infrastructure and OS level, Invicti tests whether the applications those workloads serve are actually exploitable – by interacting with them directly, the same way an attacker would.

The core mechanism is DAST, including AI-enhanced DAST: dynamic application security testing that probes live web applications and APIs for vulnerabilities that are observable only by interacting with an application that’s running and receiving real requests – SQL injection, authentication flaws, access control failures, and others that syscall monitoring simply can’t see.

What separates Invicti from other DAST tools is proof-based scanning. Most scanners flag a potential vulnerability and leave confirmation to a person. Proof-based scanning automatically verifies whether a finding is genuinely exploitable – generating proof of exploit for confirmed issues – so the queue that reaches a developer is already validated, not a list of candidates for manual triage. That’s the specific mechanism that makes application-layer runtime testing actionable rather than speculative.

Invicti also provides multilayered API discovery that draws on multiple sources – including traffic analysis and runtime visibility – to build a continuously updated inventory of APIs across an environment, including shadow and zombie endpoints that documented inventories miss. Those discovered APIs can then be tested for exploitable vulnerabilities, connecting discovery directly to dynamic security testing.

To be clear, Invicti isn’t a CNAPP tool and doesn’t replace infrastructure runtime monitoring. It’s the application-security complement to it – the layer that confirms whether attackers can exploit what your other tools are protecting.

Comparison table

Putting the layers together

The tools in this list aren’t competing with each other. They’re covering different layers of the same environment, and the gaps between them are where real risk lives.

Infrastructure runtime tools tell you when workload behavior is suspicious. DAST tells you whether attackers can exploit the application in the first place. Modern application security isn’t choosing between the two – it’s recognizing that one without the other leaves a meaningful gap. Runtime monitoring detects that something unexpected happened inside a container; application testing determines whether the vulnerability that made it possible was sitting in an API endpoint all along, accepting malicious input that never generated an infrastructure-level signal.

Invicti’s proof-based scanning is what makes that application-layer testing operationally viable at scale – confirming which findings are genuinely exploitable before they reach a developer’s queue, so remediation effort goes to confirmed risk rather than manual verification. Request a demo to see proof-based scanning in action on your apps and APIs.