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Losing Context: Breaking & Binding MCP Sessions
Friday November 6, 2026 10:30am - 11:15am PST
Room: Grand Ballroom B (Street Level)
Session Access Control – The Missing Validation Layer The Model Context Protocol (MCP) specification explicitly distinguishes sessions from authentication but provides minimal prescriptive guidance on authorization enforcement. This talk explores the theoretical security implications of this design, where session IDs function similarly to bearer tokens but often lack the granular security controls required for enterprise-grade deployments.

The SDK Security Gap: An analysis of current MCP SDK implementations reveals an inconsistency in how session security is handled. While the specification provides various validations, most SDK implementations provide only basic checks, leaving critical validation decisions to developers without clear documentation or guidance.

Session Hijacking in MCP – Attacks and Mitigations We will examine how session hijacking attacks apply to MCP’s stateful transport model. Through concrete architectural examples and demonstrations of three High Severity CVEs affecting officially supported MCP SDKs, we will analyze specific attack vectors that allow unauthorized parties to hijack valid session contexts. Additionally, we will briefly examine two further CVEs related to the broader MCP SDK ecosystem. We will also touch upon the upcoming MCP spec 2026-07-28 changes that eliminates protocol-level session management but the security problem remains in application-level state. We conclude with practical, defense-in-depth strategies, including duplicate connection prevention, user binding, strict session expiration mechanisms, and robust validation patterns that developers can implement to harden their MCP servers regardless of their chosen SDK.

Attendees will gain:
- A comprehensive understanding of MCP’s session model and the mechanics behind the two CVEs in MCP SDKs.
- Analysis of which SDKs provide built-in session security and which require custom implementation.
- Actionable security patterns for binding sessions to authenticated users.
- Practical mitigation strategies for preventing session hijacking and unauthorized resource access.
Speakers
avatar for Srikanth Ramu

Srikanth Ramu

Principal Security Engineer
I am an Application Security professional with extensive experience in product security, built on a solid foundation in development and QA. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I developed an interest in hunting bugs in open-source libraries specifically targeting Java Deserialization vulnerabilities... Read More →
Friday November 6, 2026 10:30am - 11:15am PST
Room: Grand Ballroom B (Street Level)
  Implementation

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