MCP Ruby SDK: Ruby SSE Session Poisoning

Summary

Vulnerability: Missing Session Ownership Validation in the Ruby MCP SDK's Streamable and SSE HTTP transport implementation. Any attacker with a stolen session ID can execute tools with the victim's session. This is a silent attack - the victim's session is compromised and being used for unauthorized actions, but it is hard to know for the victim

Details

https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/ruby-sdk/blob/main/lib/mcp/server/transports/streamable_http_transport.rb#L260-L278

Victim starts a legitimate MCP session and receives session ID abc-123 Attacker obtains the session ID (various means - network sniffing, logs, etc. out of scope for this analysis) Attacker sends POST to /messages/abc-123 with a tool call Server accepts the request (no ownership validation!) Server executes the tool and sends response to victim's SSE stream Victim receives attacker's response, thinking it's legitimate

PoC

attacker_client.py legitimate_client.py

Prerequisites

1. Python 3.8+
2. Install dependencies: requests

Running the Demo

1. Terminal 1: Start the Ruby MCP Server

ruby streamable_http_server.rb

Makes use of https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/ruby-sdk/blob/main/examples/streamable_http_server.rb This server has a tool call notification_tool which the clients call

2. Terminal 2: Start Victim Client

python3 legitimate_client.py

3. Terminal 3 - Attacker Client:

Copy the session ID from Terminal 1 and run:

python3 attacker_client.py abc-123-def-456

4. Back to Terminal 2 - Victim sees the injected response:

Impact

• HIGH - Attacker can execute unauthorized tools and modify state