Boyang Ma

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables large language models to invoke external tools through natural-language descriptions, forming the foundation of many AI agent applications. However, MCP does not enforce consistency between documented tool behavior and actual code execution, even though MCP Servers often run with broad system privileges. This gap introduces a largely unexplored security risk. We study how mismatches between externally presented tool descriptions and underlying implementations systematically shape the mental models and decision-making behavior of intelligent agents. Specifically, we present the first large-scale study of description-code inconsistency in the MCP ecosystem. We design an automated static analysis framework and apply it to 10,240 real-world MCP Servers across 36 categories. Our results show that while most servers are highly consistent, approximately 13% exhibit substantial mismatches that can enable undocumented privileged operations, hidden state mutations, or unauthorized financial actions. We further observe systematic differences across application categories, popularity levels, and MCP marketplaces. Our findings demonstrate that description-code inconsistency is a concrete and prevalent attack surface in MCP-based AI agents, and motivate the need for systematic auditing and stronger transparency guarantees in future agent ecosystems.

LLM agents often rely on Skills to describe available tools and recommended procedures. We study a hidden-comment prompt injection risk in this documentation layer: when a Markdown Skill is rendered to HTML, HTML comment blocks can become invisible to human reviewers, yet the raw text may still be supplied verbatim to the model. In experiments, we find that DeepSeek-V3.2 and GLM-4.5-Air can be influenced by malicious instructions embedded in a hidden comment appended to an otherwise legitimate Skill, yielding outputs that contain sensitive tool intentions. A short defensive system prompt that treats Skills as untrusted and forbids sensitive actions prevents these malicious tool calls and instead surfaces the suspicious hidden instructions.

Embodied AI systems integrate language models with real world sensing, mobility, and cloud connected mobile apps. Yet while model jailbreaks have drawn significant attention, the broader system stack of embodied intelligence remains largely unexplored. In this work, we conduct the first holistic security analysis of the Unitree Go2 platform and uncover ten cross layer vulnerabilities the "Ten Sins of Embodied AI Security." Using BLE sniffing, traffic interception, APK reverse engineering, cloud API testing, and hardware probing, we identify systemic weaknesses across three architectural layers: wireless provisioning, core modules, and external interfaces. These include hard coded keys, predictable handshake tokens, WiFi credential leakage, missing TLS validation, static SSH password, multilingual safety bypass behavior, insecure local relay channels, weak binding logic, and unrestricted firmware access. Together, they allow adversaries to hijack devices, inject arbitrary commands, extract sensitive information, or gain full physical control.Our findings show that securing embodied AI requires far more than aligning the model itself. We conclude with system level lessons learned and recommendations for building embodied platforms that remain robust across their entire software hardware ecosystem.