mcpSafetyScanner

# MCPSafetyScanner  > **MCP Safety Audit: LLMs with the Model Context Protocol Allow Major Security Exploits**\ > Brandon Radosevich*, John Halloran*\ > Paper: https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2504.03767 ## About MCPSafetyScanner is a safety auditor for Model Contenxt Protocol (MCP) servers. Point it at your MCP server config file and the software will use multiple agents to audit your setup and produce a safety report. Developers can use this info to patch exploits and users can use this info to harden their system. **Claude Desktop Users** can find their MCP server config files at: - macOS: `~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json` - Windows: `%APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json` ## Installation git clone https://github.com/johnhalloran321/mcpSafetyScanner cd mcpSafetyScanner python -m pip install -e . ## Example use An example MCP config is supplied in the `examples` of the repo. After updating the relevant directories and access credentials, you can perform a safety audit with the installed software by running: export OPENAI_API_KEY="YOUR_API_KEY" python3 mcpsafety/scanner/scan.py --config examples/example_config.json   The report would thus alert developers to screen for `~/.ssh/authorized_keys` and `*.pem` files, while also placing direct guardrails around printing environment variables with sensitive information (e.g., api keys). The report would thus alert users to be cautious of providing paths containing `.ssh/authorized_keys` or `*.pem` files, and, alternatively, restrict user write permissions to such files. ## Troubleshooting The software requires `python >= 3.11`. If using `conda` and `npx` is not installed, run conda install conda-forge::nodejs ## Citation If you use this code in your research, please cite: ```bibtex @article{radosevich2025mcp, title={MCP Safety Audit: LLMs with the Model Context Protocol Allow Major Security Exploits}, author={Radosevich, Brandon and Halloran, John}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.03767}, year={2025} } ```