[2607.11086] Rethinking MCP Security: A Large-Scale Study of Runtime MCP Servers and Security Scanner Reliability

Skip to main content

arXiv is now an independent nonprofit!<br>Learn more<br>&times;

Search arXiv

Press Enter to search &middot; Advanced search

-->

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security

arXiv:2607.11086 (cs)

[Submitted on 13 Jul 2026]

Title:Rethinking MCP Security: A Large-Scale Study of Runtime MCP Servers and Security Scanner Reliability

Authors:Pei Chen, Baichao An, Mengying Wu, Binwang Wan, Geng Hong, Jinsong Chen, Xudong Pan, Jiarun Dai, Min Yang<br>View a PDF of the paper titled Rethinking MCP Security: A Large-Scale Study of Runtime MCP Servers and Security Scanner Reliability, by Pei Chen and 8 other authors

View PDF<br>HTML (experimental)

Abstract:The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has rapidly established itself as a standard interface for enabling LLM-based agents to interact with external tools and services. As MCP servers are increasingly entrusted with security-sensitive operations, understanding their real-world risks has become critical. In practice, due to the absence of large-scale runtime MCP servers, such understanding largely relies on security scanners applied to a small number of cases, yet the reliability of these assessments remains unclear.

In this study, we revisit how MCP security is measured. We present MCPZoo, the largest collection of MCP servers for dynamic analysis to date. MCPZoo is constructed through a multi-agent framework for transforming in-the-wild static repositories into dynamic services. The framework emulates how human experts build, diagnose, and iteratively repair deployment and runtime defects by combining environment inference with feedback-driven refinement. To ensure practical interactivity at runtime, the servers are validated via real protocol interactions. As a result, MCPZoo contains 64,611 unique MCP servers (113,927 in total), with more than 37,288 supporting dynamic analysis. Leveraging MCPZoo, we conduct the first ecosystem-scale measurement of MCP servers and the scanners that analyze them. While existing scanners report that 96.89% of servers are risky, we find that these signals are unreliable. In particular, manual validation shows that less than 50% of sampled alerts are true positives, and scanner outputs exhibit clear inconsistency across scanners. Overall, MCPZoo enables large-scale, reproducible measurement of MCP server security and exposes limitations of current scanning practices. We further release a public query interface to support practical risk assessment of MCP servers.

Comments:<br>18 pages, 11 figures, and 10 tables. This article substantially extends the preliminary 3-page MCPZoo dataset release arXiv:2512.15144. Includes appendices

Subjects:

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2607.11086 [cs.CR]

(or<br>arXiv:2607.11086v1 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.11086

Focus to learn more

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history<br>From: Pei Chen [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:55:16 UTC (327 KB)

Full-text links:<br>Access Paper:

View a PDF of the paper titled Rethinking MCP Security: A Large-Scale Study of Runtime MCP Servers and Security Scanner Reliability, by Pei Chen and 8 other authors<br>View PDF<br>HTML (experimental)<br>TeX Source

view license

Current browse context:

cs.CR

next >

new<br>recent<br>| 2026-07

Change to browse by:

cs

References & Citations

NASA ADS<br>Google Scholar

Semantic Scholar

export BibTeX citation<br>Loading...

BibTeX formatted citation

&times;

loading...

Data provided by:

Bookmark

Bibliographic Tools

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer Toggle

Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)

Connected Papers Toggle

Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)

Litmaps Toggle

Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)

scite.ai Toggle

scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)

Code, Data, Media

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv Toggle

alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)

Links to Code Toggle

CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)

DagsHub Toggle

DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)

GotitPub Toggle

Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)

Huggingface Toggle

Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)

ScienceCast Toggle

ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)

Demos

Demos

Replicate Toggle

Replicate (What is Replicate?)

Spaces Toggle

Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)

Spaces Toggle

TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)

Related Papers

Recommenders and Search Tools

Link to Influence Flower

Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)

Core recommender toggle

CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)

Author

Venue

Institution

Topic

About arXivLabs

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have...