MCP Servers and the Return of the Service Account Problem

The report warns that MCP servers are emerging as persistent, highly privileged access brokers that replicate and amplify the historical failures of service accounts—specifically long-lived credentials, accumulating permissions, and public exposure—leading to amplified attack surface and misuse; it recommends proving identity per request via cryptographic attestation, issuing just-in-time scoped tokens, preserving user and agent context for access decisions, and enforcing centralized policy at the MCP boundary to prevent privilege accumulation and confused-deputy and token-based attacks.