MCP safety audit: LLMs with the model context protocol allow major security exploits

To reduce development overhead and enable seamless integration between potential components comprising any given generative AI application, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) mcp:anthropic has recently been released and, subsequently, widely adapted. The MCP is an open protocol which standardizes API calls to large language models (LLMs), data sources, and agentic tools. Thus, by connecting multiple MCP servers-each defined with a set of tools, resources, and prompts-users are able to define automated workflows fully driven by LLMs. However, we show that the current MCP design carries a wide range of security risks for end-users. In particular, we show that industry-leading LLMs may be coerced to use MCP tools and compromise an AI developer’s system through a wide range of attacks, e.g., malicious code execution, remote access control, and credential theft. In order to proactively mitigate the demonstrated (and related) attacks, we introduce a safety auditing tool, McpSafetyScanner, the first such agentic tool to assess the security of an arbitrary MCP server. McpSafetyScanner uses several agents to: a) automatically determine adversarial samples given an MCP server’s tools and resources, (b) search for related vulnerabilities and remediations given such samples, and (c) generate a security report detailing all findings. Our work thus sheds light on serious security issues with general purpose agentic workflows, while also providing a proactive tool to audit the safety of MCP servers and address detected vulnerabilities prior to deployment.