Compatibility at a Cost: Systematic Discovery and Exploitation of MCP Clause-Compliance Vulnerabilities
Nanzi Yang, Weiheng Bai, Kangjie Lu

TL;DR
This paper systematically analyzes vulnerabilities in the MCP interoperability standard, revealing how relaxed clauses enable attacks like prompt injection and DoS, and proposes a framework for detection and analysis.
Contribution
It introduces a universal IR generator and a static analysis framework with LLM guidance to identify MCP clause compliance issues across multiple languages.
Findings
Identified multiple MCP vulnerabilities enabling attacks
Developed a language-agnostic IR for SDK normalization
Created a modality-guided pipeline for vulnerability detection
Abstract
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a recently proposed interoperability standard that unifies how AI agents connect with external tools and data sources. By defining a set of common client-server message exchange clauses, MCP replaces fragmented integrations with a standardized, plug-and-play framework. However, to be compatible with diverse AI agents, the MCP specification relaxes many behavioral constraints into optional clauses, leading to misuse-prone SDK implementation. We identify it as a new attack surface that allows adversaries to achieve multiple attacks (e.g, silent prompt injection, DoS, etc.), named as \emph{compatibility-abusing attacks}. In this work, we present the first systematic framework for analyzing this new attack surface across multi-language MCP SDKs. First, we construct a universal and language-agnostic intermediate representation (IR) generator that…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSecurity and Verification in Computing · Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning · Access Control and Trust
