Challenges and Opportunities in the Model Context Protocol (MCP)

What are the problems? MCP, as an open standard, allows any model client to support it and enables server-side multi-distribution, but long‑term use reveals issues such as unnecessary complexity and security concerns.

Unnecessary complexity The protocol adds a layer of abstraction that could be avoided by letting LLMs call existing RESTful APIs directly, leading to redundant tooling and new security and permission problems.

Security Threats exist at creation (malicious server registration), runtime (tool name collisions, ambiguous commands, outdated permissions) and update stages (stale permissions remaining active). The paper "Model Context Protocol (MCP): Landscape, Security Threats, and Future Research Directions" discusses these in detail.

Access control Enterprise users prefer self‑hosted MCP servers with separated data and control layers to ensure compliance and support varied user access.

Based on OAuth 2.1 authentication, replace HTTP+SSE with streaming HTTP, and support JSON‑RPC batch processing.

Persistent connections and statefulness MCP maintains stateful connections allowing multiple requests per session, which improves efficiency but conflicts with the trend toward stateless APIs.

Tool overload Packing all tools into the model context wastes tokens and can destabilize model behavior; a hierarchical routing or namespace approach is needed.

Summary Many MCP issues remain; the community’s roadmap proposes solutions, and the author remains cautiously optimistic while continuing research on agent networks and multi‑turn tool invocation.

Opportunity Solving these problems could unlock significant potential for developers and new products.

Server gateway Acts as a mediator managing connections, authentication, routing, load balancing, and tool selection, similar to traditional API gateways. Companies like Zapier and Cloudflare already offer MCP‑compatible solutions.

Server discovery Finding and configuring MCP servers is still manual; tools like mcp-get or a server directory could simplify this.

Server hosting Remote MCP server hosting is emerging, with Cloudflare providing OAuth 2.1 libraries, MCP agents, adapters, and an AI playground for testing.

Server security Security should follow DevSecOps practices across creation, runtime, and update phases to ensure integrity and safe operation.

Tool invocation management A standardized client layer could handle tool discovery, ranking, and invocation, reducing duplicated effort and improving user experience.