MPMA: Preference Manipulation Attack Against Model Context Protocol

Understand

Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes interface mapping for large language models (LLMs) to access external data and tools, which revolutionizes the paradigm of tool selection and facilitates the rapid expansion of the LLM agent tool ecosystem.

• However, as the MCP is increasingly adopted, third-party customized versions of the MCP server expose potential security vulnerabilities.
• In this paper, we first introduce a novel security threat, which we term the MCP Preference Manipulation Attack (MPMA).
• An attacker deploys a customized MCP server to manipulate LLMs, causing them to prioritize it over other competing MCP servers.