Mcp Registry Audit

mcp-registry-audit

A read-only reconnaissance CLI that scans public MCP (Model Context Protocol) registries for two supply-chain attack shapes — rug-pulls (a server that turns malicious in a later version) and lookalikes (brand impersonation) — and produces a ranked, evidence-traced candidate list for manual review.

Read-only by design

The scanner only reads public metadata. It never installs, executes, imports, unpacks, or process-spawns any target, and it never contacts any URL, domain, or endpoint found inside a package — those are treated as inert strings to be scored, never reached. All network access is plain HTTP GET against registry and package-backend APIs. Confirmation of any candidate is a separate, manual, sandboxed step performed by a human — never by this tool.

What it does

Two pipelines over a shared, cached, read-only fetch core:

• Lookalike — matches server names against a canonical brand set (normalized name-distance + homoglyph + substring) and scores publisher mismatch, off-canonical install, fresh repo, thin/fake contributor graph, and official-sounding-but-low-trust naming.
• Rug-pull / drift — resolves a server to its npm/PyPI/GitHub source, diffs consecutive published versions, and scores newly-introduced outbound calls, hardcoded sinks, install hooks, env-harvest-near-network, maintainer changes, and obfuscation.

Every candidate score traces to a named signal with its evidence, so a human can confirm or dismiss each by reading the source.

Install

From source (editable):

git clone https://github.com/Nesqcck/mcp-registry-audit
cd mcp-registry-audit
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate       # Unix; on Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"

Usage

hunt pull --registry all          # build/refresh the local read-only index
hunt lookalikes --enrich          # Pipeline B: brand-impersonation candidates
hunt diff --top 200               # Pipeline A: rug-pull / version-drift candidates
hunt rank --out candidates.csv    # merge both, ranked -> out/ (JSON + CSV + XLSX)

The local index/cache is written under cache/ and outputs under out/; both are git-ignored. Optionally set GITHUB_TOKEN in the environment for higher GitHub rate limits during --enrich.

Tech stack

Python 3.12+ — httpx (GET-only fetching), pydantic (data model), typer (CLI), rapidfuzz (name-distance scoring). Two independent pipeline modules over one read-only fetch-and-cache core.

Writeup

Background, method, and snapshot findings: https://nesqcck.github.io

Source & license

This open-source MCP server is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: Nesqcck
• Source: Nesqcck/mcp-registry-audit
• License: MIT
• Homepage: https://nesqcck.github.io

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.