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MCP Security
Model Context Protocol (MCP) security from a working engineer: what changes when an MCP server moves from a laptop to a hosted gateway, how tenant isolation and approval gates fail outside the happy path, and how a trojanized MCP server built trust through a fake developer ecosystem. Several posts measure my own open-source scanner, mcpscan, against real CVEs and against fixtures built to fool it.
16 posts
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10 min read
I Traced 29 CVEs in One MCP Server to 4 Root Causes
29 mcp-atlassian CVEs traced to 4 root causes: DNS rebinding, credential fallback, tool allowlist and file_path. The safe version floor is 0.23.1, not 0.22.0.
- MCP Security
- Security Engineering
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7 min read
MCP Costs 72% of Your Context: The Fix Pi Shipped
MCP tool schemas can eat 72% of your context window. How Pi's Codemode and deferred tool loading fix it, plus a minimal registry sketch you can reuse.
- MCP Security
- Engineering Practice
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10 min read
MCP Servers Had a Rough 48 Hours: 4 Unauthenticated CVEs
Four MCP servers published unauthenticated CVEs in about 35 hours, plus LiteLLM's KEV-listed bypass. Fixed versions and a checklist to audit your MCP servers.
- MCP Security
- Security Engineering
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7 min read
No CVE needed: how a GitHub issue hijacked an AI agent
In a demo, one GitHub issue hijacked an AI agent via the GitHub MCP server and leaked private repo data. Why it needs no CVE, and what I changed.
- AI Security
- MCP Security
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3 min read
A fake MCP server spent three months earning trust. The tells were there
A fake MCP server from SmartLoader earned trust for three months. See which signals attackers can farm, which are costly to fake, and a pre-install checklist.
- MCP Security
- AI Security
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6 min read
What Is MCP Security? Common Attacks and How to Scan Your MCP Servers
What is MCP security? Four attacks found testing 11 MCP servers: tool poisoning, command injection, path traversal, planted prompts, and how to scan for them.
- MCP Security
- AI Security
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3 min read
200,000 exposed MCP servers later, the boring checks still win
Roughly 200,000 vulnerable MCP servers are exposed, mostly through basic config mistakes. Here are five quick checks to run on your own MCP server today.
- MCP Security
- Deployment
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4 min read
My Scanner Passed Until I Built a Harness That Lied to It on Purpose
I built a harness of synthetic attack fixtures to test my own scanner, mcpscan: 6 of 7 fired, and the miss, a leaked key in a JSON config, taught me the most.
- MCP Security
- Security Engineering
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3 min read
The NSA published 17 pages on MCP security. Here it is as a checklist you can run today
The NSA's 17-page MCP security guidance as seven checks you can run today: inventory, pinning, tool descriptions, sessions, privileges, egress, logs.
- MCP Security
- AI Security
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2 min read
Benchmarking My MCP Security Scanner: 14 of 14 Findings, Zero False Positives
MCP security scanner benchmark: 14 of 14 planted findings detected, 0 false positives across 5 fixtures and 24 tools, at a median 82 microseconds per manifest.
- MCP Security
- Security Engineering
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4 min read
A Happy-Path MCP Demo Proves Almost Nothing About Tenant Isolation
A happy-path MCP demo proves little about tenant isolation. What an MCP security preflight checks with static rules and behavioral tests, and what it cannot.
- MCP Security
- AI Security
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3 min read
What Actually Changes When an MCP Server Leaves Your Laptop
Moving an MCP server behind a gateway: per-request auth, tenant isolation, request-bound approvals and structured logs, plus a lab with 13 runtime tests.
- MCP Security
- Deployment
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9 min read
MCP 2026-07-28 Went Stateless: A Planted Prompt Is a Credential
MCP 2026-07-28 drops sessions and the initialize handshake, so a handle in the context window becomes a credential. Five per-request checks for server authors.
- MCP Security
- AI Security
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6 min read
My MCP Security Scanner Missed 2026's Worst MCP RCE: Here Is the One-Rule Fix
My mcpscan path traversal rule MCP007 only covered file reads and missed four 2026 MCP CVEs, including a CVSS 9.1 RCE. Here is the write-sink fix.
- MCP Security
- Security Engineering
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5 min read
The MCP attack your code review cannot see
MCP tool poisoning hides instructions in tool descriptions with invisible Unicode that code review misses. mcpscan is a static scanner with 12 checks.
- MCP Security
- AI Security
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4 min read
I gave Claude a memory of everything I browse — here's the architecture
How BraveMCP connects a browser extension to Claude Desktop over MCP, with an HTTP bridge, SQLite and ChromaDB hybrid search, and a useful no-LLM fallback.
- MCP Security
- Open Source