Model Context Protocol servers have quickly become the connective tissue between AI agents and the outside world — file systems, databases, APIs, internal tools, you name it. That convenience comes with a catch: the tools, prompts, and schemas an MCP server exposes are a new kind of attack surface, and most traditional scanners simply don't look there. MCPRadar is an open-source project built specifically to close that gap.
Why this matters
A recent academic study examining nearly 1,900 MCP servers found meaningful security issues in a surprising share of them — general vulnerabilities in roughly 7% and MCP-specific tool poisoning in another 5%. Tool poisoning, prompt injection hidden in tool descriptions, and quietly over-permissioned configurations are easy to miss because they don't look like a "normal" vulnerability — there's no CVE, no obvious buffer overflow, just a tool description that quietly tells an agent to do something it shouldn't.
MCPRadar's whole premise is that this class of risk deserves the same rigor as any other part of your CI pipeline.
What it actually scans
