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Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP

blog.modelcontextprotocol.io

101–110 of 124 posts

Re: Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP

#101

Before you get too far into the usual “MCP is dead, Skills forever” debate The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. This is valuable from a security perspective obviously. It’s also just a much easier user experience for normies and large businesses adopting AI tools. I hear all the context…

MCP tool search fixes the major issue imo, MCP clears skills/clis in every other way

Re: Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP

#102

Before you get too far into the usual “MCP is dead, Skills forever” debate The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. This is valuable from a security perspective obviously. It’s also just a much easier user experience for normies and large businesses adopting AI tools. I hear all the context…

I’m work on a platform for restaurant reviewing with your friends, and (after a few stumbles) MCP definitely seems the way to go. Normies will not hunt down their claude directory and paste a skill file. “Connections” is something they understand, and pasting the mcp or finding it in the marketplace is easier for them.

TBD if having agent access to places and reviews is helpful, hah!

Re: Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP

#104
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No worries, always appreciate the discussion. Good luck on the launch!

You sound like someone who is technically well-versed with the landscape. would love to get some feedback from you.

Haha, so much to learn so I wouldn't say I'm well-versed.

But let me know when you launch. My email is in my profile.

Re: Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP

#106

Before you get too far into the usual “MCP is dead, Skills forever” debate The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. This is valuable from a security perspective obviously. It’s also just a much easier user experience for normies and large businesses adopting AI tools. I hear all the context…

I’m work on a platform for restaurant reviewing with your friends, and (after a few stumbles) MCP definitely seems the way to go. Normies will not hunt down their claude directory and paste a skill file. “Connections” is something they understand, and pasting the mcp or finding it in the marketplace is easier for them. TBD if having agent access to places and reviews is helpful, hah!

"Normies" pasting in MCP sounds like a nightmare from a security perspective.

Re: Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP

#108

Before you get too far into the usual “MCP is dead, Skills forever” debate The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. This is valuable from a security perspective obviously. It’s also just a much easier user experience for normies and large businesses adopting AI tools. I hear all the context…

MCP tool search fixes the major issue imo, MCP clears skills/clis in every other way

Yes, people conflated progressive disclosure as a method with skills as a particular implementation because skills became the first widely adopted use of progressive disclosure.

But progressive disclosure is just a method that you can apply to lots of things to reduce context bloat. Any time you provide some kind of limited index or search to an AI and then let it expand that based on the circumstances of the request, it's progressive disclosure.

And one of the things you can apply it to is MCPs.

Re: Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP

#109
post #15

Hey folks - I am one of the folks at Anthropic that helped deliver this in partnership with Okta and a handful of MCP partners. We're very excited about this taking shape in Claude (in addition to the MCP spec, of course, where EMA is now a stable extension) and are looking to expand adoption to other identity providers and clients as well. If you have any feedback, feel free to drop it in here! Always happy to hear…

Long time no see! It's been a while since I've looked at MCP, but I think this does a really good job at making MCP more secure for organizations and addressing some of the weaknesses of dynamic client registration. Now that clients and approved redirect URIs can be setup directly by the IdP and organization, a lot of the attacks that were possible with DCR (confused deputy, phishing attacks, etc.) can be mitigated more broadly. It also makes it so servers don't have to implement as much authorization logic as they did before if the IdP or organization didn't support DCR, which is a pretty big advantage (especially if they combine MCP auth with existing API auth).

One major downside is consumer usage seems to still need DCR with this. I think this could potentially be addressed by existing consumer OAuth providers (Sign in with GitHub, GitLab, Google, etc.) adding support for registering static MCP clients/servers, clients shipping their static client IDs inside them, clients allowing users to sign in with GitHub/GitLab/whatever IdP, and letting the user self-manage connections on the IdP's site.

Overall, XAA/EMA seems vastly superior to DCR from a security perspective (and also usability too, since users don't have to configure as much!). The concerns I have are also much easier to address and have way less security impact than with DCR, since attackers don't get to register their own clients anymore and there are less pitfalls for MCP server developers.

Re: Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP

#110
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fantastic news. Is there any communication between you folks and the Microsoft Entra (Azure AD) team? Would love to know if we can expect this soon or if will take a while.

We are in touch with the Microsoft Entra ID folks to see how we can better integrate EMA in their stack!

Fantastic, appreciated.
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