MCP-Shield

Security and privacy

mcp server security scanner

SHOW HN2025

134points
39comments
#559of 3,837 in 2025
Top 15%of 2025 by points

How HN took it

RoastedHalf or more of the comments are critical

3 positive, 3 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 7 critical, out of 14 comments about the project. Thread score -0.23.

Idea: 2 for, 3 againstExecution: 0 for, 4 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Useful space for security tooling

    From 1 comment
    • Nice! This is a much-needed space for security tooling, and I appreciate that you've put some thought into the new attack vectors. I also like the combination of signature-based…
      khafra on HN
  • Good that it combines pattern matching with LLM analysis

    From 1 comment
    • Nice! This is a much-needed space for security tooling, and I appreciate that you've put some thought into the new attack vectors. I also like the combination of signature-based…
      khafra on HN

Objections

  • Regex denylists are easy to bypass

    From 1 comment
    • Sorry, but this will never work very well. The tool contains a bunch of "denylist regexes", i.e. ``` `user (should not|must not|cannot) see` ``` But these can easily be bypassed.…
      NicolaiS on HN
  • Analysis step uses an LLM that is itself open to prompt injection

    From 2 comments
    • So the analysis is done with another call to claude with instructions like "You are a cybersecurity expert..." basically another level of extreme indirection with unpredictable…
      hollowturtle on HN
    • Sorry, but this will never work very well. The tool contains a bunch of "denylist regexes", i.e. ``` `user (should not|must not|cannot) see` ``` But these can easily be bypassed.…
      NicolaiS on HN
  • Does not scan prompt injection in tool results

    From 1 comment
    • Cool. If I'm not wrong you don't detect prompt injection done in the tool results? Any plans for that?
      pcwelder on HN
  • Server can report different tools to scanner than to clients

    From 1 comment
    • Neat, but what’s to stop a server from reporting one innocuous set of tools to MCP-Shield and then a different set of tools to the client?
      paulgb on HN

Requests

  • Scan resources as well as tool definitions

    From 1 comment
    • This is pretty cool. You should also attempt to scan resources if possible. Similar to the tool injection attack Invariant Labs discovered, I achieved the same result via…
      mlenhard on HN
  • Integrate with kgateway

    From 1 comment
  • Detect prompt injection in tool results

    From 1 comment
    • Cool. If I'm not wrong you don't detect prompt injection done in the tool results? Any plans for that?
      pcwelder on HN

Questions

  • Will it detect injection in non-English tool descriptions

    From 1 comment
    • It seems that writing a tool in anything else than English will bypass most of this scanner
      calyhre on HN

Alternatives named

  • mcp-scan by Invariant Labs

    From 1 comment
    • Cool work! Thanks for citing our (InvariantLabs) blog posts! I really like the identify-as feature! We recently launched a similar tool ourselfs, called mcp-scan:…
      marcfisc on HN
  • vet by SafeDep

    From 1 comment
    • May be try out vet as well: https://github.com/safedep/vet vet is backed by a code analysis engine that performs malicious package (npm, pypi etc.) scanning. We recently extended…
      abhisek on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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