devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Mike Vizard

  • Embracing the MCP Suck: Taming the Wild West of AI Protocols

    Embracing the MCP Suck: Taming the Wild West of AI Protocols

    The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is moving faster than the developer community can keep up with, racing past its original design parameters and leaving teams scrambling to build clients that can match its pace. The result is an ecosystem where the protocol itself keeps shifting under everyone’s feet, and where the tooling, conventions and security thinking that should accompany a foundational standard are still being figured out on the fly.

    Joey Stout, solutions architect at Spacelift, joins Mike Vizard to make the case that this is the price of being early. Stout describes an environment that increasingly resembles a Wild West, where rogue MCP servers get spun up inside organizations without anyone in leadership knowing they exist, let alone whether they have basic guardrails wrapped around them. The convenience of standing one up in a few minutes has outrun the discipline needed to govern them.

    MCP servers can give AI agents broad reach into internal systems, data and APIs, and most of the early implementations were never designed with adversarial behavior in mind. Without authentication standards, scoped permissions and observability built in, every new server becomes another piece of shadow infrastructure that can be exploited, misconfigured or simply forgotten until it causes a problem.

    Stout’s advice for developers is blunt: embrace the suck. The protocol is going to keep changing, the security story is going to keep evolving, and waiting for a stable, fully governed version before getting hands-on isn’t a realistic option. The teams that learn to wrangle MCP now — messy edges and all — will be the ones positioned to set the patterns everyone else ends up following.

  • The Open Source Trap: Why Trust Isn’t a Security Strategy

    The Open Source Trap: Why Trust Isn’t a Security Strategy

    The XZ Utils backdoor was a wake-up call, but the underlying problem it exposed has not gone away. Sophisticated adversaries are playing the long game, spending months or years earning trust within open source projects before introducing malicious code into libraries that sit at the foundation of modern software infrastructure. Mike Vizard and Josh Bressers, VP of security at Anchore, dig into why the software supply chain remains dangerously vulnerable and what the industry is getting wrong in its response.

    Bressers points out that the vast majority of open source projects are maintained by a single person or a very small group of volunteers. These maintainers are often overworked and under-resourced, managing critical dependencies that thousands of organizations rely on in production. When an attacker targets one of these projects, the maintainer is the entire security perimeter. No amount of scanning or compliance tooling downstream can fully compensate for a compromise that happens at the source.

    The instinct for most organizations is to throw money or tooling at the problem, but Bressers argues that approach misses the point. Running vulnerability scanners is necessary but insufficient. The deeper issue is that companies consuming open source at scale are not contributing back in meaningful ways, whether through code review, maintenance support or funding that actually reaches the people doing the work. The supply chain cannot be secured from the outside alone.

    Trust has functioned as the default security model for open source adoption, and the XZ Utils incident demonstrated exactly how that model can be exploited. Moving to a “trust but verify” approach requires organizations to understand what is actually in their dependency trees and to take an active role in protecting the projects they depend on.