Study: 25% of Public MCP Configs Leak API Keys in Plaintext

checkpointdev · reddit · 2026-08-22

A security audit of MCP (Model Context Protocol) configs reveals significant credential leakage risks in public repositories.

Data: Scanned 2,000 configs across 1,622 GitHub repos; 1,113 defined environment variables.
Findings:
25% (279) contained plaintext secrets.
17% (196) correctly used variable indirection.
26 exposed valid credential formats for vendors like GitHub, Anthropic, and OpenAI.
Observation: Many leaks were AWS doc examples; excluding them reduced false positives by 10%.
Tool: Released mcp-secrets CLI (npx mcp-secrets scan) to detect plaintext keys and migrate them to the OS keychain, supporting CI checks.

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