Mpak Trust Framework

MTF is an open security standard for describing and verifying the security posture of MCP server bundles.

Status: Draft (v0.1) License: CC BY 4.0

Overview

MCP servers extend AI assistants with powerful capabilities: filesystem access, network requests, database queries, and code execution. This power creates significant security risk. MTF provides a standardized framework for:

1. Bundle authors to demonstrate security best practices
2. Registries to enforce minimum security requirements
3. Consumers to make informed installation decisions
4. Enterprises to set procurement policies

Compliance Levels

MTF defines four compliance levels, each building on the previous:

Level	Name	Target	Controls
L1	Basic	Personal projects, experimentation	6
L2	Standard	Team tools, published packages	14
L3	Verified	Production, enterprise use	22
L4	Attested	Critical infrastructure, regulated industries	25

Security Domains

Controls are organized into five domains:

• Supply Chain (SC): SBOM, vulnerability scanning, dependency pinning
• Code Quality (CQ): Secret detection, malicious patterns, static analysis
• Artifact Integrity (AI): Manifest validation, content hashes, signatures
• Provenance (PR): Source repository, author identity, build attestation
• Capability Declaration (CD): Tool declarations, permission scopes

Specification

See MTF-0.1.md for the full specification.

Schemas

JSON schemas for validation:

• schemas/manifest.schema.json - MCPB manifest with MTF security extensions
• schemas/report.schema.json - MTF security scan report format

Implementations

Implementation	Language	Maintainer
mpak-scanner	Python	NimbleBrain (reference implementation)

Contributing

MTF is developed in the open. Contributions, feedback, and discussion are welcome.

License

This specification is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

You are free to share and adapt this material for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you provide appropriate attribution.