From Component Manipulation to System Compromise: First Systematic MCP Server Attack Taxonomy

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Researchers present the first component-level attack taxonomy for Model Context Protocol servers, moving beyond effect-based classification to show how attacks chain across MCP server components — tools, resources, prompts, and sampling. The paper introduces detection methods for multi-component attack chains and previously unknown malicious patterns that existing effect-based defenses miss. Directly relevant to the 43% of MCP servers found to have command injection vulnerabilities in recent audits.