MCP didn’t just unlock Agentic AI. It quietly handed agents the keys to your environment.
The Model Context Protocol (MCP), introduced by Anthropic, has become the connective tissue of Agentic AI stitching models to tools, APIs, data stores, and workflows with impressive ease.
This is exactly why the OWASP MCP Top 10 matters.
A recent paper, “Securing the MCP: Risks, Controls and Governance” by Herman Errico, Jiquan Ngiam, and Shanita Sojan, does an excellent job of putting structure around what many of us are already seeing in the wild.
Agents don’t just “read context” — they: • Carry tokens and secrets across boundaries • Accumulate privileges over time • Execute tool calls that look benign until they’re chained • Trust context that was never meant to be trusted
These patterns map almost one-to-one with the OWASP MCP Top 10: • Token mismanagement & secret exposure • Privilege escalation via scope creep • Tool misuse & unexpected code execution • Context poisoning & memory abuse • Cascading failures across agents and tools
The paper goes beyond hand-waving and actually shows: • How to threat model MCP servers and clients • Why design-time controls alone fail • How runtime governance, observability, and kill-switches are essential when agents act autonomously
If you’re deploying MCP today without threat modeling, runtime controls, and guardrails — you’re not “moving fast.”
You’re just giving an autonomous system production access and hoping for the best.
Read this paper. Then read the OWASP® Foundation MCP Top 10. https://owasp.org/www-project-mcp-top-10/
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