What 15,465 ungoverned MCP servers tell us about the authorization gap

Ox Security’s report, “15,465 MCP Servers, 0 Governance,” examined three public MCP registries and found that registry listings generally provide little verifiable information about server authentication, authorization, ownership, lifecycle management, or data residency. Its survey of roughly 5,095 hostnames identified servers hosted outside the United States, unresolved domains that could potentially be re-registered by others, and some services operating from home networks or consumer tunnels, highlighting risks associated with changing infrastructure control. The report argues that these issues stem less from registry discovery practices than from MCP’s historically decentralized approach to identity and access control, in which individual server developers decide whether and how to protect tool discovery and calls. It points to emerging measures including Client ID Metadata Documents for verifiable client identity, enterprise-managed authorization through identity providers, agent-registration protocols for establishing user identity, and per-call runtime policy checks. A demonstration involving a malicious server posing as a code scanner showed how broad “always allow” permissions could permit later requests for sensitive files, although results varied by model and configuration. Overall, the discussion characterizes MCP governance as uneven rather than universally absent, with security depending on controls applied throughout an agent’s lifecycle.

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