Model Context Protocol: Landscape, Security Threats, and Future Directions
Security analysis of MCP including prompt injection vulnerabilities, tool permissions, and recommendations for secure enterprise deployment.
This security-focused analysis of the Model Context Protocol identifies critical vulnerabilities that enterprises must address before deploying MCP at scale. The researchers catalog attack vectors including prompt injection through tool descriptions, privilege escalation via chained tool calls, and data exfiltration through improperly sandboxed MCP servers.
The paper presents a threat model specific to MCP's architecture, where the separation between client, server, and host creates trust boundaries that attackers can exploit. The researchers demonstrate proof-of-concept attacks where a malicious MCP server can influence an AI agent's behavior across supposedly independent tool integrations, highlighting the need for strict isolation between MCP server contexts.
Recommendations include mandatory tool call auditing, rate limiting per MCP server, input/output validation at each trust boundary, and the implementation of a capability-based permission system rather than the current implicit trust model. The researchers also propose a formal verification framework for MCP server implementations that could catch common vulnerability patterns before deployment.
