@guardbee/mcp-oauth-auditor

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An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that scans an MCP server's own authorization code for OAuth 2.1 anti-patterns named in the MCP specification's own Security Considerations section.

The MCP spec doesn't leave this to guesswork — it explicitly calls out token passthrough (forwarding a client's token to a downstream API unchanged, instead of exchanging/re-scoping it) and missing audience validation (accepting a token whose aud claim was never issued for this server) as the central authorization failure modes for a server acting as an OAuth resource server. This package checks for exactly those two, plus three related anti-patterns in the same family.

This package sends usage telemetry by default (tool name + short parameters, scanned code is never included — see @guardbee/mcp-telemetry). Disable with GUARDBEE_TELEMETRY=0.

Claude ──► oauth-auditor ──► Your MCP server's auth code
              │
              ├─ token-passthrough    (client's token forwarded unchanged downstream)
              ├─ token-validation     (jwt.verify() with no audience check)
              ├─ discovery-ssrf       (OAuth/OIDC discovery URL built from client input)
              ├─ pkce                 (authorization request missing code_challenge)
              ├─ redirect-validation  (redirect_uri checked with startsWith/includes, not exact match)
              └─ secrets-exposure     (hardcoded client_secret)

Why these two specifically

Token passthrough matters because a token a client presented to this server was scoped and audienced for this server — not whatever downstream API the server's own tool handlers call next. Forwarding it unchanged means the downstream service is trusting a credential it never issued, on the basis of a server-side decision the original token issuer never approved.

Missing audience validation is the same failure from the other direction: jwt.verify(token, key) confirms a token's signature is valid, but says nothing about who it was issued for. Without an explicit audience check, a token minted for a completely unrelated resource server — one that happens to share the same issuer/signing key — will verify successfully here too. This is the textbook confused-deputy substitution the MCP spec is warning about.

The other three patterns are adjacent, concrete instances of the same "an MCP server's auth code trusts something it shouldn't" theme: an OAuth/OIDC discovery URL built from client-supplied input (the shape behind a real disclosed CVE), a redirect_uri validated with a prefix/substring check instead of an exact match (open-redirect bypass), and PKCE silently missing from an authorization request (required by OAuth 2.1 unconditionally, not just for public clients).

Features

• 6 categories: token-passthrough, token-validation, discovery-ssrf, pkce, redirect-validation, secrets-exposure
• Two of the checks (missing audience validation, missing PKCE) look for an absence near a call site rather than a fixed regex — they extract the full jwt.verify(...) call (or the authorization-request URL construction) and confirm audience: / code_challenge is genuinely nowhere nearby, not just matched by a lucky string position
• SARIF 2.1.0 output — CI/CD integration (GitHub Code Scanning, etc.)
• Config file support via guardbee.yml
• 18 unit tests — a positive and a negative (false-positive) scenario for every pattern, plus one fully-correct OAuth flow that produces zero findings. Found and fixed a real regex bug during development (a trailing \b after a ] character that can never match, since ] isn't a word character — silently missed the bracket-notation form of header access). End-to-end verified against a fixture with all 6 anti-patterns deliberately planted (caught all 6), and against the entire guardbee-mcp monorepo (401 files — zero findings in any real third-party code; the only non-test matches were the scanner's own pattern-definition source textually containing the string jwt.verify( inside a regex literal and a doc comment, not actual vulnerable usage)

Quick Start

Claude Desktop / MCP Client

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "guardbee-oauth-auditor": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@guardbee/mcp-oauth-auditor"]
    }
  }
}

CLI (CI/CD)

npx @guardbee/mcp-oauth-auditor scan ./src --fail-on=high --format=sarif > results.sarif

MCP Tools

Detected Patterns

Configuration (guardbee.yml)

oauth-auditor:
  fail-on: high       # any | critical | high | medium | none
  max-files: 5000
  exclude:
    - ".test.ts"

Limitations (by design)

• JS/TS-oriented patterns. jwt.verify(, fetch(/axios(, template-literal URL construction — a server written in Python/Go/Rust with equivalent bugs won't be recognized by name, only by the same underlying shape if it happens to use similarly-named functions.
• Heuristic, not a full OAuth conformance test. This finds specific anti-patterns in source, not a live protocol conformance check against a running authorization server. It won't catch every way an OAuth flow can be misimplemented — only the handful the MCP spec calls out as the highest-stakes ones.
• The absence-based checks (audience, PKCE) use a bounded text window, not a real parser — a jwt.verify() call whose options object happens to be built far away from the call site (a variable passed in, rather than an inline object) won't be checked for audience correctly.

Development

npm run build
npm test             # 18 unit tests

License

MIT — GuardBee