ARTFEED — Contemporary Art Intelligence

MCP Security Extension: Attested Tool-Server Admission for LLM Agents

ai-technology · 2026-05-26

A new security mechanism, mcp-attested, addresses the trust gap in the Model Context Protocol (MCP) by enabling hosts to verify and bound tool-server access for LLM agents. Developed from the need to safely integrate Google's MCP servers (Gmail, Calendar, Drive) with the Enclawed agent, the system adds three offline-signed mechanisms without altering MCP or the tool API. The solution is open-sourced in enclawed-oss and enclaved distributions, generalizing to any regulated deployment requiring third-party tool admission.

Key facts

  • MCP standardizes message exchange between LLM agents and tool servers but lacks trust mechanisms.
  • mcp-attested was built to let the Enclawed agent use Google's MCP servers safely.
  • Google's servers include Gmail, Calendar, and Drive.
  • The mechanism bounds which servers and tools an agent may use.
  • It does not change MCP or Enclawed's tool API.
  • mcp-attested is shipped in both open enclawed-oss and enclaved distributions.
  • Three additive offline-signed mechanisms close the trust gap.
  • The solution generalizes to any unmediated third-party connection.

Entities

Institutions

  • arXiv
  • Google
  • Enclawed
  • enclawed-oss
  • enclaved

Sources