The MCP inspector is a developer tool for testing and debugging MCP servers. A cross-site scripting issue was reported in versions of the MCP Inspector local development tool prior to 0.16.6 when connecting to untrusted remote MCP servers with a malicious redirect URI. This could be leveraged to interact directly with the inspector proxy to trigger arbitrary command execution. Users are advised to update to 0.16.6 to resolve this issue.
Weakness
The web application improperly neutralizes user-controlled input for executable script disguised with URI encodings.
Potential Mitigations
- Use and specify an output encoding that can be handled by the downstream component that is reading the output. Common encodings include ISO-8859-1, UTF-7, and UTF-8. When an encoding is not specified, a downstream component may choose a different encoding, either by assuming a default encoding or automatically inferring which encoding is being used, which can be erroneous. When the encodings are inconsistent, the downstream component might treat some character or byte sequences as special, even if they are not special in the original encoding. Attackers might then be able to exploit this discrepancy and conduct injection attacks; they even might be able to bypass protection mechanisms that assume the original encoding is also being used by the downstream component.
- The problem of inconsistent output encodings often arises in web pages. If an encoding is not specified in an HTTP header, web browsers often guess about which encoding is being used. This can open up the browser to subtle XSS attacks.
References