mcp-scanner

MCP Scanner is a Python tool from Cisco AI Defense for finding security problems in MCP servers and their tools. The README says it combines three engines that can run together or separately: YARA rules, an LLM-as-a-judge, and Cisco's AI Defense inspect API. It can scan tools, prompts, resources and server instructions, and runs as a stand-alone CLI or a REST API server.

Beyond the three engines, the feature list covers vulnerable-package scanning for Python dependencies using pip-audit (CVE, PYSEC and GHSA), a zero-dependency static readiness scan for issues such as timeouts, retries and error handling, behavioural scanning of server source code, VirusTotal hash lookups for binaries bundled with servers, and scanning PyPI packages inside a Docker sandbox. It also supports static or offline scanning of pre-generated JSON files, which suits CI/CD and air-gapped setups, OAuth for SSE and streamable HTTP connections, custom YARA rules and detailed reports.

It needs Python 3.11+ and `uv`; install with `uv tool install --python 3.13 cisco-ai-mcp-scanner`. The Cisco API key, an LLM provider key and a VirusTotal key are all optional, so the YARA engine works without any key. Stdio servers can be scanned too, with a startup timeout that defaults to 60 seconds and can be raised. Licence is Apache 2.0 and the last push was 2026-10-13. This review is based on the README and repository data; we have not run it ourselves.