MCP Security: Architecture, OWASP MCP Top 10 Risks, and Defensive Practices

This MCP security course explains the Model Context Protocol, how MCP-enabled agents connect to external systems, and why those connections create new security risks. It presents a structured way to analyze agent risk using the lethal trifecta and walks through the OWASP MCP Top 10 with real-world examples, detection guidance, and remediation practices.

■ MCP foundations and architecture
- Host, client, server, and backend roles
- Request flow and trust boundaries across MCP interactions
- Why MCP changes how APIs are consumed by agents

■ Risk analysis model
- Private data, untrusted content, and external communications
- A practical scorecard for evaluating tools available to an agent

■ OWASP MCP Top 10 walkthrough
- Token mismanagement, privilege escalation, tool poisoning, supply chain risk, and command injection
- Intent flow subversion, authentication and authorization gaps, audit and telemetry gaps, shadow MCP servers, and context injection or oversharing
- Real incidents and scenarios used to illustrate each risk category
- Detection signals and remediation controls for each risk

■ Operational takeaways
- Monday-morning actions such as moving secrets to a vault, pinning and signing tool schemas, inventorying MCP servers, and logging tool calls
- Structural defenses that break one leg of the lethal trifecta

This course is aimed at developers, security engineers, architects, and platform teams working with AI agents and MCP integrations. Viewers can expect to leave with a clearer risk model for MCP deployments and concrete actions for improving visibility, access control, and incident readiness.