This tracks exactly with why I built MCP Gateway — the root
causes you listed (absent authentication, blind trust, no
access control) are all things the protocol leaves up to
each implementer to solve independently.
OAuth 2.1 + PKCE, Microsoft Entra SSO, per-tool RBAC,
full audit trail on every tool call. The gateway sits in
front of your tools so auth and access control are solved
once at the platform level rather than per-server.
Self-hostable with Docker.
First open source project — built it after seeing exactly
the pattern described here in enterprise MCP deployments.
The gateway approach (OAuth + RBAC) solves the perimeter problem — who can connect. protect-mcp solves a different layer — what can they do once connected, and how do you prove it.
It wraps any MCP server as a stdio proxy. Per-tool policies (block, rate-limit, require human approval). Every decision gets an Ed25519-signed receipt that's verifiable offline — no callbacks, no accounts.
The two layers stack: your gateway authenticates the caller, protect-mcp constrains which tools they can call and signs the evidence.
30 CVEs. 60 days. 437,000 compromised downloads. The Model Context Protocol went from “promising open standard” to “active threat surface” faster than anyone predicted.
Between January and February 2026, security researchers filed over 30 CVEs targeting MCP servers, clients, and infrastructure. The vulnerabilities ranged from trivial path traversals to a CVSS 9.6 remote code execution flaw in a package downloaded nearly half a million times. And the root causes were not exotic zero-days — they were missing input validation, absent authentication, and blind trust in tool descriptions.
If you are running MCP servers in production — or even just experimenting with them in Claude Code or Cursor — this article is your field guide to what went wrong and how to protect yourself.
https://github.com/PanosSalt/MCP-Gateway
OAuth 2.1 + PKCE, Microsoft Entra SSO, per-tool RBAC, full audit trail on every tool call. The gateway sits in front of your tools so auth and access control are solved once at the platform level rather than per-server. Self-hostable with Docker.
First open source project — built it after seeing exactly the pattern described here in enterprise MCP deployments.