OWASP MCP Top 10: Every Risk Explained

OWASP’s MCP Top 10 is a 2025 beta checklist of major security risks affecting the Model Context Protocol, which connects AI agents to tools and data, and it focuses on the protocol’s tool, server, authorization, and context layers rather than solely on underlying language models. The ten categories cover secret and token exposure, privilege expansion, poisoned tools, software supply-chain compromise, command injection, contextual prompt injection, inadequate authentication and authorization, insufficient logging, unmanaged “shadow” servers, and cross-user or cross-tenant context leakage. The discussion cites incidents and high-severity vulnerabilities from 2025 and 2026, including malicious MCP packages, unauthenticated endpoints, command-execution flaws, and data exposure through agent-accessible content, while noting that MCP authorization is optional and STDIO configurations can introduce substantial risk. Recommended controls include maintaining a complete server inventory, applying least-privilege and short-lived credentials, reviewing and pinning tool definitions and dependencies, validating inputs, isolating execution environments, treating retrieved content as untrusted, enforcing authentication, and retaining tamper-evident audit records. It also argues that gateways and runtime controls can help govern traffic, identities, tool access, and monitoring, but that organizations remain responsible for server code, direct connections, dependency security, and application memory isolation.

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