Compatibility at a Cost: Systematic Discovery and Exploitation of MCP Clause-Compliance Vulnerabilities
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 ...
| Authors | Nanzi Yang, Weiheng Bai, Kangjie Lu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 10 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 March 2026 |
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