This checklist helps you review a remote MCP endpoint’s identity, authority, transport, and data handling. That matters because a convenient shared server can otherwise become a shared escalation path.
Checklist
- Verify the HTTPS endpoint and who operates it.
- Use OAuth or another approved short-lived credential mechanism.
- Confirm issuer, audience, scopes, and token expiry are validated.
- Separate authentication from per-tool and per-resource authorisation.
- Test tenant isolation with deliberately cross-tenant identifiers.
- Set timeouts, request limits, and rate limits.
- Make mutating operations idempotent where retries are possible.
- Redact secrets and personal data from logs and traces.
- Treat server-supplied text as untrusted content.
- Define how access is revoked and how incidents are audited.
Links
Closing thought
Connectivity answers whether a host can call a remote MCP server; identity and authorisation answer whether it should.