Backend
Benchmarking My MCP Security Scanner: 14 of 14 Findings, Zero False Positives
Kiell Tampubolon Dev.to (EN Zone)
7 views
A scanner without numbers is a demo. A scanner with made-up numbers is worse. So I hand-labeled a small benchmark suite and ran the scanner against it, 1000 times per fixture.
The setup is deliberately boring:
5 synthetic MCP tool manifests: one clean (3 tools), one openly risky (4 tools), one realistic mixed shop (8 tools), one payments flavored (6 tools), and one leaky agent (3 tools) built to exercise the two newest rules. 24 tools total.
Ground truth per tool: which rule IDs should fire. MCP-001 unsafe command capability, MCP-002 excessive scope, MCP-003 secret-like value, MCP-004 untrusted input into a sensitive operation, MCP-005 credential forwarded in metadata, MCP-006 write tool without tenant scoping.
1000 timed scans per fixture, single thread, Python 3.13, no warmup tricks.
The results:
fixture
tools
expected findings
detected
false positives
median scan
safe_notes
3
0
0
0
28 us
risky_ops
4
6
6
0
63 us
mixed_shop
8
3
3
0
94 us
payment_tools
6
3
3
0
73 us
leaky_agent
3
2
2
0
89 us
Aggregate: 14 of 14 planted findings detected, 0 false positives, median 82 microseconds per manifest.
Two honest notes. First, this measures the rule engine on synthetic manifests, not detection quality on real world servers; synthetic ground truth is easy to trust too much. Second, the clean fixture matters as much as the risky ones. Zero findings there is the actual test, because a scanner that cries wolf gets ignored, and an ignored scanner is worse than none.
The harness, fixtures, and raw results ship with the repo under benchmark/, so anyone can rerun it: clone, one command, verdict. Same zero dependency habit as the test suites.
Repo: https://github.com/glatinone/mcp-security-preflight
Read original: https://dev.to/kielltampubolon/benchmarking-my-mcp-security-scanner-14-of-14-findings-zero-false-positives-438g
Related
How to Debug Python Code You Didn't Write
Backend
2
DEV Community
how do you handle legacy code you wrote yourself that you no longer understand
Backend
2
Reddit r/webdev
How I Shipped 1,000 Deployments in a Month Without Opening My Codebase
Backend
2
DEV Community
Hard Spend Ceilings, Budget Alerts, and Node.js Runaway Workload Drills
Backend
3
Dev.to (EN Zone)
Comments0
No comments yet — be the first