Toward Understanding Security Issues in the Model Context Protocol Ecosystem

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an emerging open standard that enables AI-powered applications to interact with external tools through structured metadata. A rapidly growing ecosystem has formed around MCP, including a wide range of MCP hosts (i.e., Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Desktop, and Cline), MCP registries (i.e., mcp.so, MCP Market, MCP Store, Pulse MCP, Smithery, and npm), and thousands of community-contributed MCP servers. Although the MCP ecosystem is gaining traction, there has been little systematic study of its architecture and associated security risks. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive security analysis of the MCP ecosystem. We decompose MCP ecosystem into three core components: hosts, registries, and servers, and study the interactions and trust relationships among them. Users search for servers on registries and configure them in the host, which translates LLM-generated output into external tool invocations provided by the servers and executes them. Our qualitative analysis reveals that hosts lack output verification mechanisms for LLM-generated outputs, enabling malicious servers to manipulate model behavior and induce a variety of security threats, including but not limited to sensitive data exfiltration. We uncover a wide range of vulnerabilities that enable attackers to hijack servers, due to the lack of a vetted server submission process in registries. To support our analysis, we collect and analyze a dataset of 67,057 servers from six public registries. Our quantitative analysis demonstrates that a substantial number of servers can be hijacked by attackers. Finally, we propose practical defense strategies for MCP hosts, registries, and users. We responsibly disclosed our findings to affected hosts and registries.

Key Contributions

First comprehensive security analysis of the MCP ecosystem decomposing it into hosts, registries, and servers, with qualitative threat modeling of each component
Large-scale empirical analysis of 67,057 MCP servers from six public registries, demonstrating that a substantial fraction are hijackable due to unvetted submission processes
Practical defense strategies for MCP hosts (output verification), registries (vetting pipelines), and users, with responsible disclosure to affected parties