MCP Red Team

MCP Red Team is a dynamic red-team harness for MCP agents: a transparent proxy injects attacks into live tool traffic and scores them with a deterministic oracle. Held-out headline: 0 of 978 exfiltration trials moved the planted secret; attack success concentrated under one agent framework (exploratory). See Results.

Per model, per framework; exploratory panel labeled.

MCP Red Team is a dynamic red-team harness for agents that speak the Model Context Protocol. A transparent proxy sits between an agent and its MCP servers, injects attacks into the traffic the agent sees, measures attack success rate (ASR) with a deterministic oracle, and ships an information-flow mitigation layer whose cost to the agent's useful work is measured alongside attack success. It is defensive security research: attacks run only against mock servers in this repo, and canaries are synthetic.

Threat model

• Attacker: controls exactly one upstream MCP server, or poisons data inside one otherwise-benign server's data source (a note, a file, a resource).
• Trusted: the user, the agent scaffold, the model provider, and every other upstream server.
• Attacker goals: exfiltrate a secret, trigger a forbidden action, hijack the final answer, or persist across turns.
• Out of scope (v1): compromised clients, network MITM, malicious gateways, model-weight attacks, and adaptive attackers stronger than the rule-based search reported in Results (e.g., LLM-driven or human red-teamers).

Metrics: ASR and exposure

• Raw ASR = successes ÷ trials.
• Exposure-conditioned ASR = successes ÷ trials in which the payload reached the model.
• Exposure is measured at the LLM-request boundary, via the wrapped model client: a trial is exposed when the payload (or its decoded form, for encoding mutators) appears in any model request. We report both ASR definitions together, with exposure counts and Wilson 95% CIs.

Model manifest

• Static held-out (the headline): claude-sonnet-5-5, claude-opus-5-5 (Anthropic API), reported per model and pooled across scaffolds.
• Ladder (claude-haiku-5-5, Anthropic API, + qwen3:8b): a static slice (baseline, combined, strict; OpenAI Agents SDK only) + an adaptive search. qwen3:8b = local Ollama 0.40.2, digest 500a1f067a9f, Q4_K_M, 8.2B (parallel_tool_calls=false, max_tokens=8192, sampling unset). qwen3:14b was tested and dropped (86.1% < 90% benign).
• Scaffolds: OpenAI Agents SDK + LangGraph (held-out, pooled for the headline). The Claude Agent SDK is a separate confirmatory benign slice and is excluded from held-out.

Reproduce

Two sanitized held-out recording sets are published as release assets (synthetic canaries only, home paths redacted, secret-scanned): a small rebuild bundle and the full set of every trial.

Rebuild the aggregate (small bundle — the aggregate inputs plus the answer-hijack recordings the aggregate hydrates):

gh release download heldout-static-recordings-v1 -R SrihaasaK/mcp-red-team -p 'heldout-static-recordings.tar.gz'
tar -xzf heldout-static-recordings.tar.gz
uv run python -I review/M4/heldout-static/rebuild_from_release.py heldout-static-recordings

Re-score every trial (full set — re-runs the frozen oracle over all 2,240 trials, confirms every verdict matches the per-cell records, and rebuilds the aggregate):

gh release download heldout-static-recordings-v1 -R SrihaasaK/mcp-red-team -p 'heldout-static-recordings-full.tar.gz'
tar -xzf heldout-static-recordings-full.tar.gz
uv run python -I review/M4/heldout-static/rescore_from_release.py heldout-static-recordings-full

Both reconstruct review/M4/heldout-static/aggregate.json and fail unless it is byte-identical to the committed file. Then render the held-out headline offline from the committed aggregate, with zero live model calls:

uv run mcpr report

uv run pytest additionally replays the recorded sessions with zero live calls and asserts replay equality — identical tool-call sequence, identical tool arguments, identical oracle verdict (SPEC §9.1).

Prior art

Synthetic agent-injection benchmarks (AgentDojo, InjecAgent) measure attacks inside purpose-built environments; this harness attacks real agent frameworks over live MCP traffic, in both MCP protocol eras. Static MCP scanners (mcp-scan, now Snyk Agent Scan; Cisco mcp-scanner) inspect tool metadata at install time; this harness measures runtime behavior. Out-of-band defenses such as CaMeL, FIDES and Progent enforce information-flow or policy constraints outside the model; our taint gateway belongs to this family, and we report its utility cost. Nasr, Carlini et al. ("The Attacker Moves Second", 2025) show that adaptive attackers break most published prompt-injection defenses, which is why our rule-based adaptive results are reported as a lower bound.

14. Results

Headline

We ran a pre-registered evaluation of 8 classes of indirect prompt injection against MCP-connected agents, across 2 agent frameworks (OpenAI Agents SDK, LangGraph) and 4 models (Claude Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, Haiku 5.5; Qwen3-8B open-weight): ~2,800 held-out static trials plus a rule-based adaptive search.

Findings

1. Data exfiltration failed. 0 of 978 held-out exfiltration trials moved the planted secret to any sink. The only exfiltration in the project came from adaptive search against the unmitigated open-weight model (1 of 3 targets).
2. Hijacking did not fail. At baseline, injected instructions hijacked the answer or persisted in 3.1% [1.3, 7.1] of Sonnet 5.5 trials and 2.5% [1.0, 6.4] of Opus 5.5 trials (intervals overlap).
3. The framework mattered (EXPLORATORY, not pre-registered). At baseline, every frontier success occurred under the OpenAI Agents SDK (5.1% [2.7, 9.4]); none under LangGraph (0.0% [0.0, 2.7]), with comparable payload exposure. Across all seven arms the gap persists: OpenAI Agents SDK 5.6% [4.5, 7.0], LangGraph 0.6% [0.3, 1.3], with 70 of 76 successes under the OpenAI Agents SDK. LangGraph's 6 successes all occurred in mitigation arms.
4. Susceptibility did not track model size (OpenAI Agents SDK only) (EXPLORATORY). Haiku 5.5: 16.7% [10.4, 25.7]; Qwen3-8B: 2.2% [0.6, 7.7]. A weaker model may also fail to carry out injected instructions.
5. Provider safeguards did most of the defending. Anthropic's content filter terminated 58.1% of frontier held-out trials vs 1.3% model refusals. These results include provider safeguards and may not transfer to deployments without equivalent filtering.
6. Defenses trade off. Fine-grained taint tracking costs 15.6–18.9 points of benign task success. Coarse taint and the combined set cost ~0, but no taint variant addresses hijacking or persistence, the only attacks that succeeded.

Takeaways for agent builders

• Test your scaffold, not just your model.
• Count provider-level filtering as part of your security posture, and verify it on your stack.
• Coarse data-flow control is free but blind to attacks along allowed paths; closing that gap needs per-task policies (planned v2).

Limitations

• The adaptive attacker is rule-based, not LLM-driven: measured ASR is a lower bound, and mitigation effectiveness an upper bound.
• Results include Anthropic provider safeguards.
• Two frameworks; Claude Agent SDK excluded from held-out (cli_cwd leak, D74); LangGraph class 3 N/A.
• qwen3:8b adaptive ran 1 seed instead of the pre-registered 3 (hardware; deviation D99).
• Answer-hijack counts include 2 refusal-quote cases (22 without them).
• Live runs are nondeterministic; reproducibility rests on replay.
• Era comparison (SPEC §4.3): the stateless-fallback was not triggered (two scaffolds speak the 2026-07-28 era, D7), but the held-out headline scaffolds are OpenAI Agents SDK (stateless) and LangGraph (stateful-only), so protocol era is confounded with scaffold; no isolated era comparison is claimed.