mcpSafetyScanner

MCPSafetyScanner

MCP Safety Audit: LLMs with the Model Context Protocol Allow Major Security Exploits
Brandon Radosevich*, John Halloran*
Paper: https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2504.03767

About

MCPSafetyScanner is a safety auditor for Model Contenxt Protocol (MCP) servers. Point it at your MCP server config file and the software will use multiple agents
to audit your setup and produce a safety report. Developers can use this info to patch exploits and users can use this info to harden their system.

Claude Desktop Users can find their MCP server config files at:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

Installation

git clone https://github.com/johnhalloran321/mcpSafetyScanner
cd mcpSafetyScanner
python -m pip install -e .

Example use

An example MCP config is supplied in the examples of the repo. After updating the relevant directories and access credentials, you can perform a safety audit with the installed software by running:

export OPENAI_API_KEY="YOUR_API_KEY"
python3 mcpsafety/scanner/scan.py --config examples/example_config.json

The report would thus alert developers to screen for ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and *.pem files, while also placing direct guardrails around printing environment variables with sensitive information (e.g., api keys). The report would thus alert users to be cautious of providing paths containing .ssh/authorized_keys or *.pem files, and, alternatively, restrict user write permissions to such files.

Troubleshooting

The software requires python >= 3.11.

If using conda and npx is not installed, run

conda install conda-forge::nodejs

Citation

If you use this code in your research, please cite:

@article{radosevich2025mcp,
  title={MCP Safety Audit: LLMs with the Model Context Protocol Allow Major Security Exploits},
  author={Radosevich, Brandon and Halloran, John},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.03767},
  year={2025}
}