Secure MCP Auth Demo

A small, local teaching demo that uses a real MCP Streamable HTTP server with JWT bearer-token authentication and scope-based authorization.

It is intentionally separate from the LangChain and LangGraph demos in this workspace.

What it teaches

The demo models three roles:

The protected MCP tools are:

The request path

Streamlit teaching client
  -> Authorization: Bearer <JWT>
  -> MCP Streamable HTTP server (/mcp)
  -> validate signature, exp, iss, aud
  -> read trusted sub and scope claims
  -> allow or deny the requested tool

The JWT includes sub, scope, aud, iss, iat, exp, and jti. JWT payloads are signed, not encrypted: do not place passwords, API keys, or sensitive personal information in them.

Run locally

This project uses an isolated virtual environment.

.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe server.py

In another terminal:

.\.venv\Scripts\streamlit.exe run app.py --server.port 8503

Open http://127.0.0.1:8503. Choose Alice, Bob, or Admin, inspect the issued token claims, and try each tool. For example, Alice receives HTTP 403 when trying notes_create, while Bob succeeds.

Verify

.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m unittest discover -s tests -v

The server also exposes MCP protected-resource metadata at:

http://127.0.0.1:8765/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource/mcp

Teaching boundary

The local app issues tokens itself so every part of the flow is easy to inspect. That is suitable for a lesson, not for a deployed service.

For production, replace auth.py's local issuer with a trusted OAuth/OIDC authorization server such as Auth0, Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Amazon Cognito, or a company identity provider. Keep the MCP server's validation of issuer, audience, expiry, signature, and scopes.

MCP's HTTP authorization model uses bearer tokens in the Authorization header on every request, validates tokens as an OAuth resource server, and uses 401 for missing or invalid credentials and 403 for insufficient scopes. See the MCP Authorization specification.