Securing MCP servers before the AI rollout outpaces security

Publisher excerpt From CSO Online

Your company’s CTO has a plan to implement your company’s first LLM-based application. The board approved it, and now you’re finding out about it. It’s a typical story I hear all the time, and I’ve lived it myself. You’ve heard everything about models and LLMs, but now you see this new term all over the place: Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers —and the realization that you now need to make sure they are implemented securely. What is an MCP server? MCP servers are like the ODBC of the 1990s. Before ODBC, every application needed custom code to query databases. ODBC defined a single standard on how to talk to databases, and database vendors just developed a driver to talk to their solution. MCP servers work in the same way: the AI app just needs to use the standardized methods to communicate with the local MCP host, and each available tool (databases, file shares, CRMs) provides an MCP server that translates the MCP transmissions into the tool’s native format. So, you just need a driver on your MCP host to talk to any available endpoint. Fig.1 – MCP architecture. Greg Neville The MCP Hosts will be in your environment, and you can control the ingress and egress traffic allowed for each MCP Host. One MCP Host can also access more than one MCP Server, allowing greater scalability, but it also adds risk. Fig. 2 – Example marketing LLM application. Greg Neville Top priority MCP controls At this stage, define requirements before the MCP server implementation gets too f…

Excerpt only, shown with attribution. This content belongs to the original publisher and has not been independently verified by CyberSecurity.pk.