gwsadm-mcp

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Google Workspace security-audit MCP (Model Context Protocol) server — read-only visibility into account locks, suspicious logins, and external file sharing, built on the Admin SDK Reports API (audit activities).

Named after the admin-console viewpoint (gwsadm = Google Workspace admin), sibling of boxadm-mcp. This is not a general-purpose Workspace MCP: it surfaces risk, it never mutates anything.

Features

Planned: dlp_events (Reports rules; requires a Workspace edition with DLP), token_events, admin_events.

Auth model

Service account with domain-wide delegation (DWD) impersonating an audit-capable admin. Fully non-interactive — no browser, no token refresh rotation — so the server runs unattended (cron, MCP gateway, CI).

Grant all of the following DWD scopes on the same service-account client ID up front, in one setup pass. Adding them one at a time as each tool gets built is how a scope goes missing until the one tool that needed it starts degrading — one place, one pass, avoids the trap:

health_check needs no scope at all to respond: it is the tool to call when a grant might be missing — it probes each domain and reports the failing auth in a structured per-domain result instead of failing itself.

gmail_message_trace needs one more scope, granted as a separate step — it is intentionally not bundled into the pass above:

This is a materially broader grant than the three above: it allows reading message content for any user the service account impersonates, not just metadata. The tool code itself only ever requests format="metadata" — it never reads a message body — but the grant itself does not enforce that; the narrower gmail.metadata scope was considered and rejected because it does not support the q= search parameter the rfc822msgid: lookup needs. Grant it on the same service-account client ID as the other scopes (Admin console → Security → API controls → Domain-wide delegation → find the existing client ID → add this scope to its list), and weigh that broader exposure against how much you actually need message-trace before turning it on for a given domain.

group_delivery_policy and list_group_members each need their own separate scope too — three more grants beyond the base pass, none bundled with each other or with gmail.readonly above:

The Groups Settings API is a distinct product from the Directory API, hence the separate scope; it has no readonly-only variant, but this server only ever calls groups().get(), never a mutating method.

suspended_accounts, get_user and user_oauth_tokens all operate per configured domain (Directory domain=/userKey=), unlike the customer-wide Reports tools — so every domain you want covered (e.g. a separate student domain) needs its own [domain.*] config section. Note the failure modes differ: suspended_accounts silently omits an unconfigured domain from its result, while get_user and user_oauth_tokens fail loudly with an unknown-domain error (both take a domain override for an alias/secondary address whose suffix has no section of its own).

Setup

# uv
uv pip install gwsadm-mcp

# pip
pip install gwsadm-mcp

Or from source:

git clone https://github.com/shigechika/gwsadm-mcp.git
cd gwsadm-mcp

# uv
uv sync

# pip
pip install -e .

Configuration

Point GWSADM_CONFIG at an INI file (default ~/.config/gwsadm-mcp/config.ini, keep it 0600):

[gwsadm]
# optional; defaults to all [domain.*] section names
internal_domains = example.edu, mail.example.edu

[domain.example.edu]
service_account_file = /path/to/service-account.json
subject = audit-admin@example.edu
customer_id = C0xxxxxxx

One [domain.*] section per audited Workspace domain. internal_domains is the allowlist used to classify sharing targets as internal vs external.

Usage

Claude Code

Add to .mcp.json (no env needed when the config lives at the default path; add "env": { "GWSADM_CONFIG": "..." } only for a non-default location):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gwsadm-mcp": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "gwsadm-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Claude Desktop

Add the same entry to claude_desktop_config.json.

Direct Execution

gwsadm-mcp

CLI Options

gwsadm-mcp --version   # Print version and exit
gwsadm-mcp --check     # Config + auth + API smoke for every domain, then exit
gwsadm-mcp             # Start MCP server (STDIO, default)

--check exit codes: 0 success, non-zero on config or auth failure.

Notes

• Every result section reports capped: true when a window exceeded the page budget, or when a probe's fetch errored outright (see event_errors) — partial coverage is never presented as "no findings". The drive scan also reports capped_events (which eventNames were cut short). Narrow hours or raise max_pages for full coverage — on a large tenant, term-time weekdays can produce thousands of change_user_access events/day.
• Google's visibility=shared_externally is relative to the file owner's domain, so with multiple internal_domains a cross-internal-domain grant (e.g. student domain → staff domain) carries it too. External-ness is therefore judged against internal_domains using the grant's target: target_user for named grants, target_domain for domain-scoped grants (e.g. "anyone at partner.edu"; the literal domain "all" means "anyone with the link" and is judged by visibility instead). risky_visibility_events counts only transitions into people_with_link / public_on_the_web (excluding a narrowing from public down to link-only). untargeted_external_transitions is a residual bucket for transitions into shared_externally with no target address or domain to classify — it is not a cross-check for grants missed elsewhere, since domain-scoped grants are already counted above. external_samples / exposure_samples / untargeted_samples hold examples of each.
• Drive events are queried one audit-relevant eventName at a time, so the page budget is not consumed by view/edit noise; an event name rejected by the API degrades into event_errors instead of failing the tool. change_document_visibility and change_document_access_scope report the same transition as simultaneous sibling events on this API — only the latter drives classification (the former is fetched for its acl_events count only), so a domain-scoped grant or a link/public exposure is never double-counted across the two. This also means the former can no longer compensate if the latter's own fetch fails: a change_document_access_scope entry in event_errors sets capped: true for that domain, and its classification counts for the window are a lower bound even though change_document_visibility (and thus acl_events) may show data.
• A failure in one domain degrades only that domain's section ({"error": ...}).
• gmail_message_trace sets ambiguous: true (with match_count) on a recipient whose mailbox has more than one message under the same Message-ID (mailing-list copy plus a direct CC, a quarantine-release duplicate, …) — the rest of that recipient's fields describe only the first match, not a combined answer. match_count_capped is set alongside it when the mailbox has enough matches that match_count is a lower bound rather than exact (the search does not paginate).
• get_user distinguishes "this address names no account" from "the lookup failed": a plain HTTP 404 answers found: false with no state fields, which is a diagnostic result — a typo'd or deleted address — and never an error. A missing DWD scope or a transient failure answers {"error": ...} with no found key instead, so the two can never be confused in either direction. Fields Google omits stay null rather than being coerced: a missing suspended must not read as "the account is fine".
• group_delivery_policy normalizes the Groups Settings API's "true"/"false" string fields (a quirk of that API, not JSON booleans) into real booleans in its output; a field absent from Google's response stays null, never coerced to false. list_group_members runs its group-metadata and member-roster lookups independently — a tenant with only one of the two DWD scopes still gets that one section, the other reported as {"error": ...} in its place. It reports capped: true both when the member roster exceeded its page budget (default 20 pages × 200/page) and when the member lookup failed outright (see members_error) — either way the roster is not the full one, and an empty members list must never be read as a confirmed-empty group when capped is true. Both group tools distinguish "this address is not a group" (a plain HTTP 404, verified against production for all three underlying API calls) from a real failure: group_delivery_policy sets found: false; list_group_members sets it too, when either both independent lookups agree with no error on either side, OR one CONFIRMS not-found while the other independently failed (that failure is then attached as group_lookup_error / members_lookup_error rather than hidden) — a confirmed non-existence outweighs an unrelated error on the other scope. Only a genuine mixed state (one side not-found, the other actually finding data) falls through to the normal per-section shape instead.
• Read-only by design: activities().list (Reports API), users().list / users().get / tokens().list / groups().get / members().list (Directory API), groups().get (Groups Settings API), and messages().list / messages().get (Gmail API, metadata only) are the only API calls issued anywhere in this package.
• Output contains account addresses (that is the point of an audit tool): restrict access to authorized security staff. gmail_message_trace also returns a message snippet and headers (From/To/Cc/Subject/Date) for a matched message — treat its output with the same care as the mailbox content it is drawn from.

Development

git clone https://github.com/shigechika/gwsadm-mcp.git
cd gwsadm-mcp

# uv
uv sync --dev
uv run pytest -v
uv run ruff check .

# pip
python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -e . && .venv/bin/pip install pytest ruff
.venv/bin/pytest -v
.venv/bin/ruff check .

Live smoke test

The unit suite never talks to Google, which is what makes it fast — and also what makes it blind to a tool that has stopped returning real data. scripts/smoke_test.py runs every registered tool against the configured tenant and fails on empty, malformed or error answers:

# uses the same config file as the server (GWSADM_CONFIG)
uv run python scripts/smoke_test.py
uv run python scripts/smoke_test.py --only oauth --traceback

• Read-only. Every tool here reads an audit log or a directory snapshot; nothing in Workspace is changed. daily_brief_start creates a job inside the process, which expires on its own.
• No payloads in the report. Tool names, statuses and row counts only; server-authored error text is redacted too, since these tools deal in account addresses and document titles throughout.
• Bounded. Every bounding parameter a tool offers is passed explicitly — the defaults (5 pages, 180 days, 200 events) are sized for a human asking once, and are enforced by a test that finds them from the source.
• Nothing tenant-specific in the specs. The account and the document the per-user and per-document tools need are discovered at run time, and skipped when the tenant has none to offer. Two tests keep it that way: one refuses those parameters as literals, the other bans anything address-shaped anywhere in the file, because this repository is public.
• An empty answer passes: no external sharing and no locked accounts is the desired state. What is asserted instead is the envelope — and, where the answer is keyed by domain, that the domain map is not empty, since a config resolving to zero domains would otherwise report every tool as working while auditing nothing.
• CI enforces the cheap half: a tool registered without a probe spec fails the build (tests/test_smoke_probes.py), so adding a tool forces the question "how would we know it works?".
• scripts/smoke_harness.py is the engine and holds no Workspace knowledge: it is kept identical across the servers that share it, so fix engine bugs once and sync the file rather than patching this copy.

Releasing

Releases are automated with release-please. Merging Conventional Commits (feat:, fix:, …) to main keeps a release PR open with the next version and changelog. Merging that PR tags vX.Y.Z and publishes a GitHub Release, whose release: published event triggers the release workflow to build and publish to PyPI and the MCP Registry. release-please owns the version in gwsadm_mcp/__init__.py and server.json (do not bump them by hand).

[!IMPORTANT] The release-please workflow should be given a repository secret RELEASE_PLEASE_TOKEN (a PAT with contents: write + pull-requests: write). The default GITHUB_TOKEN cannot create the Release that triggers the downstream release workflow (GitHub blocks workflow runs triggered by GITHUB_TOKEN), so without the PAT nothing gets published. The workflow falls back to GITHUB_TOKEN when the secret is unset so PR CI keeps working on forks.

License

MIT