MCP Trust Registry

Check before you connect. A neutral, public danger grade for the MCP servers your AI agents rely on.

Live: mcp-trust.vercel.app

Not yet published to PyPI. Install from source using the Quickstart below.

Use as an MCP server

mcp-trust runs as a read-only MCP server so an agent can check a server's danger grade before connecting — it serves a baked snapshot of real scan grades with explicit per-record provenance, so no database or network is needed.

mcp-trust mcp-serve          # from a source/dev install (works today)
uvx mcp-trust mcp-serve      # once published to PyPI

Connecting an MCP server hands it influence over what your agent does. Tool poisoning, prompt injection, over-broad permissions, and rug-pull tool mutations are documented attack classes -- and today there's no quick way to vet a server before you wire it in. MCP Trust Registry scans public MCP servers and gives each one a single readable danger grade (A-F), a separate transparency signal, and the findings behind them.

Think OSV.dev / Socket.dev / haveibeenpwned, scoped to MCP servers.

Related MCP server: dominion-observatory

Prerequisites

• Python >= 3.11

• uv (used for dependency management and running the project)

How it works

register a server  ->  scan via engine  ->  derive grade  ->  persist  ->  serve at a stable URL

The registry does not reimplement vulnerability detection. It orchestrates a pluggable scan engine -- the shipping backend wraps the public mcp-audits (>=2.1) package -- and owns the catalog, the public trust-grade normalization, persistence, and the lookup API.

Quickstart

git clone https://github.com/saagpatel/mcp-trust.git && cd mcp-trust
uv pip install -e ".[dev]"      # core + dev deps (runs on the built-in StubEngine)
mcp-trust seed                  # load the seed catalog
mcp-trust scan mcp-reference-time   # scan a catalog server, print its grade
mcp-trust check mcp-reference-time  # look up the latest stored grade
mcp-trust serve                 # serve the API on http://127.0.0.1:8000

For real scanning install the engine extra and select it:

uv pip install -e ".[dev,engine]"
MCP_TRUST_ENGINE=mcpaudit mcp-trust scan mcp-reference-time

Scanning launches the server's process. For untrusted servers, isolate execution in a locked-down container (no network, read-only fs, dropped caps, resource limits):

MCP_TRUST_ENGINE=mcpaudit MCP_TRUST_SANDBOX=docker mcp-trust scan mcp-reference-time

The default is no sandbox (safe only for servers you trust).

API

Every server has two orthogonal signals: a danger grade (A-F) and a transparency level (high/medium/low, from annotation coverage). Automated grades are not endorsements, certifications, or claims that a server is malicious. A low grade on a low-transparency server means "cannot verify safe," not "known dangerous."

HTTP scan triggering is fail-closed by default. Public deployments should set MCP_TRUST_PUBLIC_READONLY=1, which makes POST /servers/{slug}/scan return 403 before any engine can run. Operator scans should normally run through the CLI against the persistent registry DB, not through public traffic.

For local API demos with the deterministic StubEngine, set MCP_TRUST_ALLOW_UNAUTHENTICATED_STUB_SCANS=1. Do not set that in public. Token-gated API scan triggering is still available for private operator surfaces by setting MCP_TRUST_SCAN_TOKEN and passing it as Authorization: Bearer <token> or X-MCP-Trust-Scan-Token.

Set MCP_TRUST_RECEIPTS_DIR=/data/mcp-trust/receipts during real scan runs to archive a JSON receipt for each scan and store its portable artifact filename in report_ref.

Manual refresh candidates

Create a review candidate without mutating the canonical registry, baked snapshot, static site, schedule, or deployment:

uv run --frozen --extra engine python scripts/refresh_candidate.py create \
  --db ./registry.db \
  --out-dir ./dist/refresh-candidates

The command refuses local-process scans unless Docker and every catalog-pinned image are already available locally. Those sources run through the existing network-off, read-only, capability-dropped, resource-bounded sandbox. Remote endpoints are probed over their live network transport without a local process sandbox and are labeled accordingly. The immutable bundle contains receipts, catalog identity, scan times and ages, masked/failed/unknown evidence states, attributed scan drift, an honest static snapshot, and a content-bound manifest.

Candidate creation has no publication or deployment authority. A structurally valid candidate must first pass verify, then receive a separate digest-bound, short-lived approve receipt before publish may stage it in a local output directory. verify exits successfully only for a current, complete, reviewed-input-bound candidate that is eligible for publication. Eligibility never grants approval, publication, deployment, or scheduling authority.

Status

Live at mcp-trust.vercel.app as a statically generated catalog, regenerated from the local registry. The bundled catalog snapshot contains 23 visible real mcp-audits grades; eight reviewed entries are withheld by masked-grades.json and are absent from the public snapshot. The bundled snapshot labels the visible local-process grades' network and sandbox provenance as unknown; only a receipt-verified refresh candidate may claim network-off execution. Every grade is labeled by provenance, so demo/stub data can never read as a real scan, and an unscanned server never shows a letter grade. The current production deployment is the 31-server static catalog; grades are static since 2026-07-11, when the weekly re-scan lane was disabled and its deploy authority removed (see docs/CAPABILITY-RULING-2026-07-10.md).

The static front door is the low-ops launch path (see DEPLOY-VERCEL.md); a weekly launchd job under deploy/launchd/ remains installed but disabled. Its compatibility entrypoint can create a local review candidate only; it cannot publish or deploy. The live FastAPI service + VM path remains documented in DEPLOY-VM.md as an alternative. See SPEC.md for the full contract and LAUNCH-GATE.md for launch history. The deployed catalog reports scan timestamps as its freshness authority; static HTML does not claim to attest machine-local scheduler state.

Contributing

uv.lock is intentionally committed to the repository to ensure reproducible installs across environments. When adding or updating dependencies, commit the updated uv.lock alongside your pyproject.toml changes.

License

MIT