Exposed: Critical Security Vulnerabilities in AI’s New Communication Standard – MCP Under Scrutiny
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Model Context Protocol (MCP), Anthropic's open standard for connecting AI agents to external tools and data, concentrates every agent-to-tool interaction through a single interface — creating a high-value attack surface. The analysis maps OWASP LLM Top 10 vulnerabilities to MCP's architecture, covering prompt injection, insecure output handling, excessive agency, supply chain risks, and data poisoning. MCP-specific attack vectors are detailed: context manipulation via poisoned server responses, unauthorized tool access through broken auth, DoS on MCP infrastructure, rogue server discovery exploitation, passthrough attacks on backend systems, communication channel interception, and identity spoofing. Data privacy risks are examined across the full data flow, including write-operation dangers. Multi-agent and multi-session scenarios amplify these risks through context isolation failures and permission management complexity. Mitigations include enforcing TLS 1.3, OAuth 2.1 with Resource Indicators (RFC 8707), least-privilege tool scoping, mutual authentication, input/output validation, rate limiting, data minimization, and human-in-the-loop controls for high-impact actions.
