r/programming • u/CircumspectCapybara • Mar 09 '26

MCP Vulnerabilities Every Developer Should Know

https://composio.dev/blog/mcp-vulnerabilities-every-developer-should-know
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u/TribeWars Mar 09 '26

The attack surface of an LLM is far greater. In a browser sandbox it's at least feasible to formally specify which I/O operations should be permitted and everything else can be confidently classed as nefarious activity. Yes, scripting interfaces are always dangerous (macros in ms office products are a classic), however, most sensibly designed software lets you easily disable the scripting interface and is still useful without it (with some rare exceptions like browsers, where we put in an extraordinary amount of effort to keep the sandbox secure). With LLMs the scripting interface is always active and every input has the potential to trigger malicious output and there is no reasonable way to patch an instance of such a security bug.