Tenable Identity Exposure MCP Server

An MCP server exposing the Tenable Identity Exposure (TIE, formerly Tenable.ad) REST API as tools for LLM clients. Built on FastMCP from the official mcp SDK.

Verified end-to-end against a live TIE SaaS instance (v3.120.1).

⚠️ Disclaimer: This is not an officially supported Tenable project. It was built with assistance from Claude — treat its output as a starting point and validate responses against the Tenable console before acting on them.

Origin: this repository builds on knethteo/tenable-identity-exposure-mcp by Kenneth Teo, MIT-licensed. See LICENSE for the original copyright.

Credentials are never stored in this repository

There is no API key here, and there never has been — .env is git-ignored and absent from the history. Every user supplies their own key at runtime; see Configuration. TIE API keys are per-user, do not expire, and inherit the issuing account's console permissions, so share a single key only if you are willing to lose per-person attribution in the TIE audit log. Prefer one least-privilege key per person.

Tools

Read-only by default

Non-GET calls are refused unless the server is started with --allow-writes (or TIE_ALLOW_WRITES=true). This applies to tie_request and to the create/update/delete actions of tie_resource_action.

Some endpoints are never writable, even with --allow-writes: users, roles, saml-configuration, ldap-configuration, syslogs, email-notifiers, lockout-policy, application-settings, attack-type-configuration, license, infrastructures, directories, and the uncatalogued /api/login, /api/logout, /api/relays. These reconfigure authentication, access control, or alert/log forwarding, change the monitored AD topology, or — in the case of /api/login — would turn the server into a credential-testing oracle for the console. The block covers nested routes too, so PATCH /api/infrastructures/{i}/directories/{d} is refused, not just the top-level path.

Deviance records are never writable either. PATCH/PUT/DELETE is refused on /api/profiles/{p}/checkers/{c}/deviances and /api/profiles/{p}/checkers/{c}/ad-objects/{a}/deviances, alongside the single-deviance route the topology block already covered. Those two bulk routes close every deviance for a checker or an AD object in one call: silently erasing findings is the worst thing this server could be talked into doing. POST on the same paths is a search and stays available — TIE models several reads as POST.

Credential endpoints are never readable either, by any method or tool and regardless of --allow-writes:

Read-only mode is worth nothing if the model can read the key: TIE API keys do not expire and carry the issuing account's full console permissions, so anyone who sees the transcript could drive the console directly. tie_catalog declares these endpoints as blocked so the model is told once rather than retrying around one refusal at a time.

Two more endpoints stay readable but come back redacted. Per Tenable's published OpenAPI spec, GET /api/ldap-configuration returns searchUserPassword and GET /api/application-settings returns smtpAccountPassword. Both were already write-protected, but that only guarded writes — reading either one handed the model a live credential, and in the LDAP case searchUserDN + searchUserPassword is a complete Active Directory service-account bind pair, not merely a console one.

Blocking them outright would cost real audit capability (whether LDAP is enabled, which SMTP relay is configured, the log-retention window), so the endpoints remain readable and only the credential fields are replaced:

{ "enabled": true, "url": "ldaps://dc1.example",
  "searchUserDN": "CN=svc-tie,OU=Service,DC=example",
  "searchUserPassword": "<redacted: credential; this server never returns it>" }

The redaction matches field names (password, passphrase, secret, privatekey) so a credential field Tenable adds later is covered without a code change, and it is applied only to those two endpoints — Active Directory data legitimately carries PasswordNeverExpires, passwordLastSet and "Password not required", and those are the findings this server exists to report, not secrets to hide. A field that is absent or empty is left as-is, so "no bind password is configured" stays a readable answer.

tie_request also refuses absolute URLs — only server-relative paths such as /api/about are accepted, so the API key cannot be sent to another host.

None of this replaces server-side authorization. Scope the API key to a least-privilege TIE role as well.

Time windows, profiles, and token budget

• Time-aware tools (tie_recent_activity, tie_deviances) accept a relative hours=N window or explicit date_start/date_end. All timestamps are UTC.

• IoE/IoA data is profile-scoped. The API does not expose which profile your console has selected, so pass profile_id explicitly — use tie_profiles to list them.

• By default, deviance/object results are slimmed: descriptions are rendered from their templates and oversized attribute values (SID lists, member dumps) are dropped. Pass verbose=true for the full raw payload. This applies to every deviance tool, tie_deviances_bulk included — at its default caps (4,000 records) the raw payload runs to tens of megabytes.

• Results that were cut short say so. Anything that stops at a page cap, a result cap, or a failed sub-lookup reports it in a notes array, and a directory list that cannot be read is an error rather than an empty timeline. Read notes before concluding that something does not exist.

Configuration

Set via environment variables (or the equivalent CLI flags):

Auth uses the X-API-Key header.

Getting the API key: TIE console → user profile icon (top right) → My Account / Preferences → API key. It is a per-user setting, the same path on SaaS and on-premises. The key inherits the issuing account's role permissions, so create a dedicated least-privilege service account for it.

Not a Tenable Vulnerability Management key. TIE uses a single opaque key in an x-api-key header against your own console hostname (https://<client>.tenable.ad). Tenable VM / Tenable One use an accessKey+secretKey pair in an X-ApiKeys header against cloud.tenable.com. They are not interchangeable — and if Tenable Cloud Data Collection is enabled, TIE auto-creates tie-{username}-{random} accounts inside your Tenable VM container that will not work here.

Install & run

Setting this up for the first time? ONBOARDING.md walks through it end to end on Windows, Linux, and macOS — install, getting an API key, registering with Claude Code, and a set of checks to confirm it works. The rest of this section is the short version.

python -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .

cp .env.example .env   # fill in TIE_URL and TIE_API_KEY

# stdio (Claude Desktop / Claude Code)
set -a; . ./.env; set +a
tenable-tie-mcp

# or network transports (bind 127.0.0.1 by default — they have no auth of
# their own, so widen --host only behind an authenticating proxy)
tenable-tie-mcp --transport sse --port 8000
tenable-tie-mcp --transport http --port 8000

Reaching a network transport from another host

FastMCP validates the Host header against an allow-list that contains only loopback names, so --host alone is not enough: a server bound to 0.0.0.0 answers 421 Misdirected Request to any client that addresses it by IP or DNS name. Name the host your clients actually use:

# clients connect to http://tie-mcp.internal:8000/sse
tenable-tie-mcp --transport sse --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8000 \
                --allowed-host tie-mcp.internal:8000

Passing --host <name> (rather than 0.0.0.0) adds that name automatically. Loopback stays accepted either way, and the server logs a warning whenever the allow-list is widened — this is a Host header check, not authentication. Anyone who can reach the port inherits the configured API key's permissions, so put it behind an authenticating proxy.

Tests

uv pip install --group dev
pytest
mypy

Running with uv / uvx (alternative to a manual venv)

uv can manage the environment for you. uv is the full tool; uvx (alias for uv tool run) runs a package in a throwaway env, like npx. Both need uv installed (brew install uv).

# uv run: resolves deps from pyproject.toml into a managed .venv, then runs
uv run tenable-tie-mcp

# uvx: run ephemerally from the project path, nothing persisted
uvx --from . tenable-tie-mcp

Claude Desktop / Claude Code config

Use the full path to the executable. Claude Desktop does not launch from your shell, so it does not inherit your PATH — a bare tenable-tie-mcp will fail with "command not found" unless the tool is on the system PATH (e.g. a pipx install).

For a venv install, point at the venv's launcher:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "tenable-tie": {
      "command": "/absolute/path/to/tenable-ie-mcp/.venv/bin/tenable-tie-mcp",
      "env": {
        "TIE_URL": "https://your-host.tenable.ad",
        "TIE_API_KEY": "your-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Find the exact path with echo "$PWD/.venv/bin/tenable-tie-mcp" from the project root. See claude_desktop_config.sample.json for a complete example.

If you installed globally with pipx install . (or uv tool install), the bare "command": "tenable-tie-mcp" works because it lands on the system PATH.

With uv (alternative)

Point command at the full path of uv (which uv, e.g. /opt/homebrew/bin/uv) and let it manage the environment:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "tenable-tie": {
      "command": "/opt/homebrew/bin/uv",
      "args": ["run", "--directory", "/absolute/path/to/tenable-ie-mcp", "tenable-tie-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "TIE_URL": "https://your-host.tenable.ad",
        "TIE_API_KEY": "your-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Docker

docker compose up --build   # reads TIE_URL / TIE_API_KEY from environment

Example prompts

• "Show me IoE and IoA activity in the last 12 hours." → tie_recent_activity

• "Which security profiles exist?" → tie_profiles

• "List the monitored directories and their security scores."

• "Show the latest IoA attacks against directory 8."

• "What IoE deviances appeared for checker 15 in the last day?" → tie_deviances

• "Show unread alerts for profile 2."

Notes

• profile_id defaults to 1 (the default Tenable profile) in the convenience tools.

• Attacks must be scoped: resource_type ∈ infrastructure|directory|hostname|ip and resource_value is the id or name/ip.

• Non-JSON responses are returned as {"content_type": ..., "text": ...} rather than crashing.

• Scoring and prioritization: TIE checkers carry no native severity or criticality score — the published checker schema has no such field. remediationCost is the only effort hint, and note that it comes back as an integer (the console renders the easy / medium / hard labels itself) and Tenable marks it deprecated, so it is a weak basis for ranking on its own. If your workflow requires AES (Asset Exposure Score) or ACR (Asset Criticality Rating) — for example, to rank affected identities by business risk — connect your environment to Tenable One. Tenable One aggregates data across TIE, Tenable Vulnerability Management, and other sources to produce unified AES/ACR scores that can be surfaced here via the API.