@guardbee/mcp-security-proxy

🇬🇧 English | 🇹🇷 Türkçe | 🇨🇳 中文

A transparent security layer that sits in front of any MCP server. Blocks prompt injection attacks, masks PII in responses, and writes every request to an immutable audit log.

This package sends usage telemetry to GuardBee by default (tool name + short parameters, see @guardbee/mcp-telemetry) — separate from and independent of its own local audit log. Disable with GUARDBEE_TELEMETRY=0.

Claude ──► MCP Security Proxy ──► Any MCP Server
                │
                ├─ Prompt injection detection  (27 rules, EN + TR)
                ├─ PII + secret masking        (TC, VKN, IBAN, card, phone, 22 key formats)
                ├─ Block or warn mode
                ├─ Toxic-flow (lethal trifecta) blocking
                └─ Hash-chained audit log

Features

• Prompt Injection Protection — 27 rules in English and Turkish; precise ones block, generic phrases only warn
• Tool-result injection — the same patterns applied to tool results, tagged MCP06:2025. Block mode replaces the result; warn mode prepends a warning
• Session tool pin — the first tools/list is pinned. A later description or schema change is a rug pull (MCP03:2025). Block mode keeps serving the pinned definition and refuses the drifted call
• PII Masking — TC Kimlik No, VKN, IBAN, card and phone numbers (checksum-validated), email, 22 provider key formats, private keys and connection strings are masked in responses
• Block / Warn Mode — each interceptor can independently run in blocking or warning mode
• Audit Log — configurable log written to console or a file
• Gateway mode — several MCP servers behind one proxy, one YAML policy (allow / deny / mask / warn)
• Toxic-flow blocking — tracks the lethal trifecta across servers and blocks the egress call that would complete it
• Zero Code Changes — attaches in front of any existing MCP server

Quick Start

npm install -g @guardbee/mcp-security-proxy

Add to claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "secure-filesystem": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y", "@guardbee/mcp-security-proxy",
        "--", "npx", "-y",
        "@modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem", "/tmp"
      ]
    }
  }
}

The proxy launches whatever comes after -- as the target MCP server.

Gateway Mode: Several Servers, One Policy

Put every MCP server behind one proxy with a guardbee-proxy.yaml. init does the move for you:

npx -y @guardbee/mcp-security-proxy@^1 init --client claude-desktop   # or cursor, claude-code, --file ./mcp.json

It moves each stdio server into ~/.guardbee/guardbee-proxy.yaml (mode 0600), backs up the client config and points it at the proxy. HTTP servers stay as they are and are reported, because they would bypass the policy. --dry-run prints both files without writing. Or by hand:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "guardbee": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@guardbee/mcp-security-proxy@^1", "--config", "/path/to/guardbee-proxy.yaml"]
    }
  }
}

version: 1
upstreams:
  github:
    command: npx
    args: ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-github"]
    env: { GITHUB_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN: "${GITHUB_TOKEN}" }   # read from the environment
  postgres:
    command: npx
    args: ["-y", "@guardbee/mcp-db-gateway"]

labels:                       # override the heuristic labels
  github__get_issue: [untrusted]
  github__create_pull_request: [egress]

tools:                        # what the agent sees (globs on <upstream>__<tool>)
  hide: ["*__delete_*"]
  descriptions:
    github__create_issue: "Create an issue in acme/* repositories only."

rules:                        # first match wins
  - id: no-deletes
    match: { tool: "postgres__delete_*" }
    action: deny              # allow | deny | mask | warn | approve
  - match: { tool: "postgres__query", args: { table: "salaries" } }   # dotted path → value, strings are globs
    action: mask
    mask: { fields: [salary, iban] }   # blank these JSON keys
  - match: { label: destructive }
    action: approve           # ask the person first

taint:
  mode: strict                # strict | approve | warn | off
  basis: capability           # capability | data — data: block only egress calls that carry sensitive data

interceptors:
  anomaly:                    # off unless set; limits per session, sliding window
    enabled: true
    action: warn              # warn | block
    callBurst: { count: 60, windowSeconds: 60 }

audit:
  sink: file
  filePath: ./guardbee-audit.jsonl

• Tools and prompts appear as <upstream>__<tool>.
• Toxic flow (lethal trifecta): each tool is labeled untrusted, sensitive, egress or destructive (name/description heuristics, overridable under labels). Once a session has read untrusted content (an untrusted tool or any resource) and sensitive data (a sensitive tool or any PII in a result), an egress call is blocked in strict mode and only logged in warn mode. The check spans servers: an issue read from GitHub plus a customer record from a CRM blocks a webhook on a third server.
• Rules match on tool (glob), upstream, label, session (clean | tainted) and args. mask forces PII masking for that tool even when masking is off, and mask.fields also blanks the named JSON keys in text and structuredContent. A rule's allow does not skip the toxic-flow check; relabel the tool instead.
• Tool exposure (tools): expose is an allowlist of globs on the name the agent sees (absent: every tool), and hide removes tools after it. A hidden tool is left out of tools/list, so the model never reads its description (a smaller poisoning surface and fewer tokens), and a call to it is refused and counts toward anomaly.repeatedBlocks. descriptions replaces a tool's description with one you wrote; drift detection keeps watching the server's own. Unlike a deny rule, which refuses at call time, hiding takes the tool out of the agent's view.
• Tool poisoning at tools/list (interceptors.toolPoisoning, on by default): every definition is scanned before the agent sees it — the description (yours, when you wrote one under tools.descriptions), parameter descriptions and enum values in the input schema, and the read-only annotation. It catches instructions aimed at the model (<IMPORTANT>, "do not tell the user", "ignore previous instructions"), cross-tool shadowing ("when using the X tool, always…"), requests to read .ssh/.env, hidden zero-width, bidi and ANSI characters, words with Cyrillic or Greek lookalikes, and a readOnlyHint that the description contradicts. In block mode (default; follows promptInjection.action when unset) a tool with a critical or high finding is left out of the list and its calls are refused; medium findings (encoded blobs) only warn. Each finding is logged once as ruleId: poisoning:<pattern>. The rules are the ones @guardbee/mcp-tool-poisoning-scanner uses, now shared through guard-core.
• Credentials leaving (interceptors.egressSecrets, on by default): before an egress tool runs, the arguments it would actually receive are checked for credentials — provider keys (AWS, GitHub, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Slack, …), private keys and connection strings with a password; the same fixed-format rules PII masking uses, never the broad keyword ones. Data taint only knows what this session's tools returned; this also catches a key the model got from the prompt, a file or its own context. block (default; follows promptInjection.action when unset) refuses the call, warn logs it; the audit event has the credential masked either way. A PII token stays a token for an egress tool unless piiMasking.detokenizeForEgress, so only then is its value checked. allowTools exempts tools by glob (a deploy tool that takes a DB URL, say). Personal data is left to PII masking and taint.
• Sampling (interceptors.sampling, off by default): a server can ask the agent's model for a completion (sampling/createMessage) — and a malicious one can use that to smuggle instructions to the model or pull data out. Off, the proxy does not offer sampling to servers at all. On, a request is answered only while one of that server's tool calls is running, by the session that made the call (two sessions calling the same server at once: refused, since it could belong to either); includeContext is forced to none, so a server never gets the conversation; maxTokens is capped (default 1024) and so is the number of requests per call (maxPerCall, default 3); the system prompt and messages get the injection scan; approval: true asks the person first. The model's answer goes back to the server, so it is treated as egress: a credential or data this session saw blocks it, and personal data is masked. Events use tool: sampling:<upstream> and ruleId: sampling:<check>. The capability is offered when the proxy starts, so turning it on or off needs a restart.
• Approval: approve (a rule action, or taint.mode: approve for toxic flows) shows the person a yes/no form through MCP elicitation, with the tool, the reason and the arguments. Anything but an explicit yes — decline, cancel, no answer within approval.timeoutSeconds (default 120) — blocks the call. A client without elicitation support cannot approve, so the call is blocked with a message saying so.
• Approval in the dashboard: with approval.channels: [elicitation, dashboard] and audit.dashboard set, a client that cannot show a prompt no longer blocks the call outright. The request goes to the GuardBee dashboard (MCP Gateway page) with the arguments PII-masked, workspace owners and admins get a notification, and the proxy holds the call until someone approves or denies it there or timeoutSeconds passes. Channels are tried in order; the first one that can ask gives the answer.
• Data-based taint (taint.basis: data): the default capability basis blocks every egress call once a session holds untrusted and sensitive content. With data, the proxy keeps hashed fingerprints of what sensitive tools (and PII-bearing results) returned — personal data and credentials, id-like tokens, and runs of words — and treats an egress call as a toxic flow only when its arguments carry that data (12+ words in common, or an exact identifier; PII tokens count as their values) and the session also read untrusted content. The block message names the tool the data came from. Licence text, markdown boilerplate and text that also came back from ordinary results or from 3+ tools are ignored. Fingerprints are hashes, kept in memory per session. Trade-off: a paraphrase or a summary of the data is not caught; keep capability where that matters. In capability mode the same evidence is added to the block reason when found.
• Anomaly checks (interceptors.anomaly): behaviour no single call shows, counted per session over a sliding window. callBurst — more than 60 tool calls in 60s (a loop, or a denial-of-wallet). sensitiveSweep — more than 25 different reads of sensitive tools in 300s (enumerating a store record by record; re-reading the same record does not count). destructiveBurst — more than 5 destructive calls in 60s. repeatedBlocks — more than 5 calls blocked or declined in 300s (probing the policy; a client that cannot show an approval prompt does not count). Each takes { count, windowSeconds }; the numbers above are the defaults. warn logs the first trip of each check; block refuses calls over the limit until the window slides, and after repeated blocks refuses every later call in the session. Events are warn/blocked with ruleId: anomaly:<check>, so the dashboard shows them without changes. Off unless configured.
• Quotas (quotas): caps on tool calls over a fixed window, counted across sessions — where interceptors.anomaly watches one session, a quota holds when a user opens ten. Each entry has match (tool and user globs, upstream, label, group; all optional), limit, windowSeconds and per: user (default; the OIDC user, or the session without one), session, or gateway (one budget for everyone, e.g. a paid upstream). Example: quotas: [{ id: exports, match: { label: egress, group: contractors }, limit: 20, windowSeconds: 3600 }]. Every matching quota is checked and a call counts against all of them or none; only calls that are about to reach the upstream count, so a call the policy refused does not spend quota. A full quota refuses the call with the time to retry, logs ruleId: quota:<id>, and does not count toward anomaly.repeatedBlocks. Counters live in the proxy process: several replicas each keep their own.
• Policy from the dashboard: policy: { source: dashboard, refreshSeconds: 60 } (with audit.dashboard) takes labels, rules, taint, approval, defaults and interceptors from the workspace policy edited in the GuardBee dashboard, instead of this file. Upstreams, listen and audit stay local. The proxy fetches it at start and re-checks it with an ETag; an update applies to the next call in every session (labels from the next tools/list). With no dashboard policy saved, the dashboard unreachable, or an invalid document, the proxy keeps the local or last good policy — it never runs without one.
• Personal-data counts: tool responses and resource reads that contained PII carry piiHits, a count per category (tc_kimlik, vkn, iban, credit_card, email, phone_tr; credentials as secret). Counts only, never the values, and counted even with masking off. The dashboard builds its KVKK report from them.
• Tokenize: with interceptors.piiMasking.mode: tokenize the model sees <pii:tc_kimlik:7f3a9b21> instead of the value and can still pass it to another tool: the proxy puts the real value back on the way to that server. Tokens live in memory for the session only, and are not turned back into values for an egress tool unless piiMasking.detokenizeForEgress: true.
• Prompts (prompts/get) get the same injection scan and PII masking as tool results.
• interceptors.definitionDrift.recheck: on-change skips the per-call tools/list and re-checks only after a server sends tools/list_changed, which the proxy also passes on to the agent.
• Audit log is hash-chained. By default it stores a SHA-256 of the arguments instead of the arguments, and no results; set audit.includePayloads: true to log them. Check a log with guardbee-proxy verify-audit ./guardbee-audit.jsonl.
• guardbee-proxy validate --config guardbee-proxy.yaml checks a config without starting any server.
• Without --config, the proxy also picks up ./guardbee-proxy.yaml or GUARDBEE_PROXY_CONFIG=<file>.yaml.

The single-server -- form above keeps its 0.x behavior: tool names are not prefixed, payloads are logged, and a toxic flow is only logged as a warning.

Observability (OpenTelemetry)

Every tool call is a span named tools/call <tool> (kind SERVER) with the MCP semantic-convention attributes — mcp.method.name, gen_ai.tool.name, gen_ai.operation.name: execute_tool, mcp.session.id, enduser.id (OIDC) — plus guardbee.upstream, guardbee.labels and guardbee.pii_hits. The call to the upstream is a child span (kind CLIENT, server.address = upstream). Every audit event of the call — blocks, toxic flows, approvals, warnings, a server's sampling requests — is a span event (guardbee.blocked, … with guardbee.rule_id and guardbee.reason), and a blocked call carries guardbee.blocked: true. Arguments and results are never put on spans.

The proxy depends only on @opentelemetry/api, so without an SDK the spans cost nothing. To export over OTLP/HTTP, install the SDK next to the proxy and set the standard environment:

npm i -g @opentelemetry/sdk-trace-base @opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-http @opentelemetry/resources
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://otel-collector.example.com:4318
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="authorization=Bearer …"   # if your collector needs it
export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=guardbee-gateway                      # default: guardbee-security-proxy

The Docker image already has the SDK. OTEL_SDK_DISABLED=true or OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER=none keeps it off, and a process that registered its own SDK first (zero-code instrumentation through NODE_OPTIONS) keeps that one.

Remote Mode (HTTP)

The proxy can run as a shared network service instead of a subprocess of one client. Agents connect over Streamable HTTP, and upstreams can be remote Streamable HTTP servers too.

version: 1
listen:
  transport: http              # stdio (default) | http
  host: 0.0.0.0                # 0.0.0.0 in a container; 127.0.0.1 on a laptop
  port: 8787
  path: /mcp
  apiKeys: ["${GUARDBEE_PROXY_KEY}"]   # agents send Authorization: Bearer <key>
  oidc:                       # and/or: users sign in with your identity provider
    issuer: https://login.acme.com
    audience: guardbee-gateway
  maxSessions: 100
upstreams:
  github:
    command: npx
    args: ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-github"]
  linear:
    url: https://mcp.linear.app/mcp     # a Streamable HTTP upstream
    headers: { Authorization: "Bearer ${LINEAR_TOKEN}" }
audit:
  sink: file
  filePath: /var/log/guardbee/audit.jsonl
  dashboard:
    url: https://app.guardbee.ai/api/v1/gateway/events
    apiKeyEnv: GUARDBEE_API_KEY        # workspace API key with the gateway.write scope

• Sessions are isolated. Each MCP session gets its own taint state, PII tokens and tool pins, so one agent's toxic flow never blocks another. All sessions share the upstream connections. Audit events carry the sessionId.
• No key, no network. Listening on anything other than loopback without listen.apiKeys or listen.oidc is a config error. Keys are compared in constant time, and a wrong or missing key gets 401.
• Users (listen.oidc): the proxy accepts JWTs from your OpenID Connect provider (Okta, Entra ID, Auth0, Keycloak, Google…) next to or instead of API keys. It checks the signature against the issuer's JWKS (found through its discovery document, or jwksUri), the issuer, the audience (required: a token minted for another service is refused) and the lifetime. The user comes from userClaim (default sub; email is common) and the groups from groupsClaim (default groups, a list or a space-separated string). Rules can match user (glob, e.g. "*@contractor.com") and group, and every audit event carries user. A session belongs to the user who opened it: another user's token gets 403 on it. A 401 carries WWW-Authenticate: Bearer resource_metadata=…, and /.well-known/oauth-protected-resource (RFC 9728) names the issuer, so MCP clients that implement the authorization spec find where to sign in; behind a reverse proxy set oidc.resource to the public URL.
• GET /healthz returns {"ok": true, "sessions": N}. Sessions above maxSessions get 503.
• Dashboard: audit.dashboard sends every audit event, batched, to the GuardBee dashboard with a workspace API key taken from apiKeyEnv. The key never sits in the file. If the dashboard is unreachable, events wait in memory (up to 10,000) and go out later. A rejected key is reported once on stderr. Tool calls never wait for the dashboard.
• init now also moves Streamable HTTP servers (url + headers) behind the proxy. Legacy SSE servers stay in the client config and are reported.

Docker:

docker build -t guardbee/mcp-security-proxy packages/security-proxy
docker run -p 8787:8787 -e GUARDBEE_PROXY_KEY=... -e GUARDBEE_API_KEY=... \
  -v "$PWD/guardbee-proxy.yaml:/etc/guardbee/guardbee-proxy.yaml:ro" guardbee/mcp-security-proxy

MCP Tools

The proxy does not register tools of its own. It forwards the target server's tools and applies the interceptor chain on every call.

Interceptors

Prompt Injection Detector

27 rules from @guardbee/guard-core, applied to tool arguments, tool results, resources and prompts:

• Block (13 precise, high/critical): instruction overrides in English and Turkish ("ignore all previous instructions", "önceki talimatları yok say"), DAN mode, "bypass your safety guardrails", chat-template tokens (<|im_start|>, [INST]), <system> tags, text hidden in Unicode tag characters, instructions in CSS-hidden elements or HTML comments, markdown image exfiltration beacons, requests to reveal the system prompt (English and Turkish), "send the user's data to https://…".
• Warn only (14): generic phrases that also appear in ordinary text — "act as", "you are now", "developer mode", "jailbreak", "override policy", "sen artık" — and medium-severity signals such as zero-width or bidi control characters and a line-start System: label.
• Base64: runs that decode to readable text are decoded and checked against the block rules, so an instruction cannot hide in an encoded blob.

Since 1.1, a broad phrase alone no longer blocks: in 1.0 "use jailbreak mode" or "act as a reverse proxy" in a tool result was blocked; now it is logged and the result carries a warning.

PII Masker

A number that fails its checksum (an order number, a tracking code) is left as is.

Configuration

Configurable via environment variables:

License

MIT — GuardBee