[ctx]ctxseccontext security: attacks on the harness and context layer of AI agents, plus exploited-now news, hunting and playbooks.

← Context & Harness Attacks · markdown

official (NVD entries from VulnCheck, published Oct 27)

Three open-source MCP servers (esp-mcp, Kali-GPT, hagent) pass agent-chosen tool arguments to a shell, so a prompt-injected agent can run commands as the server user

NVD entries published Oct 27, all from VulnCheck, describe the same mistake in three MCP servers: a value the agent picks is pasted into a shell command.

  • CVE-2026-117567, esp-mcp (through commit 28afddf): target, port, project_path and project_name reach asyncio.create_subprocess_shell.
  • CVE-2026-117569, Kali-GPT (through commit a608c74): scanner parameters such as target, ports, domain, wordlist and url reach subprocess.run(shell=True) in execute_tool().
  • CVE-2026-117573, hagent (through commit 761eec6): the args parameter of hagent_arduino and hagent_esp32 is interpolated into arduino-cli and idf.py commands run with shell=True.

Each entry says the flaw can be reached by an agent that has read hostile text, not just by a malicious client. What to do: if you run any of these, stop exposing them to agents that read untrusted content until fixed, and for your own MCP servers pass arguments as a list without a shell and validate them against what the tool expects.

Sources: VulnCheck: esp-mcp OS command injection via MCP tool parameters (CVE-2026-117567) · NVD: CVE-2026-117567 · NVD: CVE-2026-117569 · NVD: CVE-2026-117573