MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: MCP Security Suite
by jodoking | 2025-08-14 20:01:33+00:00
Hi HN!

We kept seeing devs get pwned through MCP tools in ways that security scanners completely miss. So we built an open-source analyzer to catch these attacks. Our first OSS by Mighty team.

The problem: At Defcon, we saw MCP exploits with 100% success rate against Claude and Llama. Three attack patterns:

Hidden Unicode in "error messages" - Paste a colleague's error into Claude, your SSH keys get exfiltrated Trusted tool updates - That database tool you've used for months? Last week's update added credential theft Tool redefinition - Malicious tool redefines "deploy to prod" to run attacker's script

Traditional scanners (CodeQL, SonarQube) catch <15% of these. They're looking for SQLi, not prompt injections hidden in tool descriptions.

What we built: git clone https://github.com/NineSunsInc/mighty-security

python analyzers/comprehensive_mcp_analyzer.py /path/to/your/mcp/tool

Scans for prompt injection, credential exfil, suspicious updates, tool shadowing. Runtime wrapper adds <10ms overhead. Fully local, no telemetry.

Why this matters: 43% of MCP tools have command injection vulns. GitHub's own MCP server was exploitable. We found Fortune 500s running database-connected MCP tools that hadn't been audited since installation. We went from paranoid code review to "AI said it works" in 18 months. The magic is real, but so are the vulnerabilities.

Demo: https://www.loom.com/share/e830c56d39254a788776358c5b03fdc3

GitHub: https://github.com/NineSunsInc/mighty-security

Would love feedback - what MCP security issues have you seen?
by JoshTriplett | 2025-08-14 20:01:45+00:00
> The problem is not only that it's impossible to make cryptography that's only secure when the good guys use it, it's that once cryptography is made insecure, it's insecure for everyone, forever.

Correct.

> Let's say police had a device which they could plug into your phone, which would send a specially signed message - a digital warrant, containing all the info a real warrant would - which be permanently be burned into the ROM of your phone, after which the phone would surrender its encryption keys, and the police could dump your unencrypted disk.

You are now advocating for making phones insecure for everyone, forever. No.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-14 20:01:47+00:00
It’s a better argument, and would gain more political ground, than do nothing.

However, there’s one major problem: Most families aren’t actually using the multi-user capabilities of their devices. Many devices, like iPads or iPhones, just don’t support multi-user at all.

The result? Either parents are tech experts again, or have deep pockets to get everyone a device, or you’re going to have a bunch of kids logged in as their parents on their devices (as is already the case). Of course, that defeats the policy goal. That’s a non-starter, unless we agreed that a device manufacturer could force a biometric check when accessing an age-verified device account.

Nobody has proposed such a thing; but if there was a good way of making sure that the age-verified user is the actual person engaging with the age-verified account, then we might have progress in that direction.

Personally though, I would really prefer to not have the government get any ideas whatsoever about dictating firmware or OS security or OS parental control requirements. Do you really want your Linux distribution mandated to implement an age check firmware with phoning home requirements to a government parental control server?
by kkfx | 2025-08-14 20:02:04+00:00
It's for SEPA area BUT it's mandatory open only for PSPs/financial institutions cutting out end customers... Also most banks have a terribly limited support. Personally I use OpenBank APUs (PSD2/DSP2) for some banks (ironically via a Canadian operator, GoCardless) and well... generic accounts are supported, stocks are not, bank cards are not etc, most exports have very poor quality.

Long story short I can auto-import in Firefly III from EU banks only via a Canadian company and the quality of the process NOT due to GoCardless but due to local banks is terrible...

That's why stablecoins are booming...
by vodou | 2025-08-14 20:02:13+00:00
It is becoming increasingly difficult to sell, or even give away, books. In Stockholm, Sweden, where I am most familiar with the situation, most charity second-hand stores no longer accept hardcover books at all. The monetary value of most second-hand books is so low that many end up being thrown away instead of recirculated.

Of course, there are rare antiquarian books that always find a buyer, but they are quite few. And perhaps nobody will mourn the vast number of cheap crime novels thrown away every day, but there is so much more: good, beautiful, high-quality books that happen to be out of fashion for the moment. These, too, are being thrown away.

It was a long time since public libraries aimed to maintain a somewhat curated (or complete-ish) collection. Nowadays it is all about statistics. If books are not borrowed often enough, they are removed from the shelves and disappear.

Perhaps I am overly pessimistic, but I fear that many, many books will, for all intents and purposes, be lost. There are so many books that aren't scanned/digitized.
by jama211 | 2025-08-14 20:02:13+00:00
It’s just a simple example of how knowing how to use a tool can make all the difference, and that can be improved upon with time. I’m not sure why you’re taking umbrage with that idea.

I know this style of arguing you’re going for. If I answer your questions, you’ll attack the specific model or use case I was in, or claim it was too simple/basic a use case, or some other nitpick about the specifics instead of in good faith attempting to take my point as stated. I won’t allow you to force control of the frame of the conversation by answering your questions, also because the answers wouldn’t do anything to change the spirit of my main point.
by brettgriffin | 2025-08-14 20:02:37+00:00
I watched the first half hour of this earlier this week. I was surprised at just how differently two people can view the world. I'm not sure I would be as dogmatic as him, but just using the first few points, I think you can make strong cases against:

1. Everything is exposed as an API with little no insight to inner workings (black box)

2. Everything should be broken down into modules at a level where one person works on that module

3. He shows a video of his video editor, saying it supports multiple inputs (like two keyboards or two mice), then says no platform supports it, but if they ever do, it will work

4. Don't implement 'good enough apis'

I hope that anybody who has ever worked on software understands that there are virtues to doing exactly the opposite of what is described in each of these points. Even if you can make an argument for any of these, you would have to qualify them with so many exceptions that you would effectively negate the entire argument.

I spent a lot of evenings early in my career watching similar videos, hoping to find some magic bullet in how people better than me do what I do. People make a living doing this on the conference circuit. Maybe it is a fools errand to try to distill something as complex and situationally dependent as software into a video, but I'm having a hard time finding any major insights in all of the videos I watched.
by leecommamichael | 2025-08-14 20:02:45+00:00
C89 still has an active community of people using the language and building things with it.

In addition to this, its existence and validity is still relied on by basically every other language via standard library, transient dependency, or calling convention. Heck, practically every C++ project probably depends on it.

The Linux Kernel, ffmpeg, SQLite, curl and many others chose C89 and often consider using C99, but most do not. Each of those projects also write at-length via newsletter or blog as to why they’re still not quite ready to update (and sometimes why they are.)
by 1234letshaveatw | 2025-08-14 20:02:47+00:00
I am specifically referring to their accomplishments, inane takes like "Musk isn't an engineer, he doesn't have anything to do with the success of SpaceX" or "Jobs doesn't deserve any of the credit for Apple's products" are common.

Don't be obtuse, while you aren't "prevented" you are certainly shouted down/shamed on social media
by ankit219 | 2025-08-14 20:03:01+00:00
This is super cool. Usually you dont see effective models at 270M out in the wild. The architectural choices are new and interesting as well.

Would it be okay for you to divulge some more training information here? With 170M embedding parameters, how do you ensure no embedding collapse and keeping the embedding matrix stable at training time?

(i know i am asking too much, but just curious). There is a clear trade off for you with vocab / transformer layers. How did you arrive at the split of 170m/100m. Does this contribute to model's performance on task specific fine tuning? Any internal experiments you could share? or public info you could point us to? Anything would be amazing.

PS: I am sorry if this is rude, but this has so many decisions i am curious about. Not intending to undermine anything, this is amazing work, and thank you for the whole Gemma series.
by dragontamer | 2025-08-14 20:03:32+00:00
I don't believe it's possible to vectorize the classic heap.

I've seen vectorized and SIMD heap implementations. They are a different data structure entirely. You basically work with 16-sorted items and then sort your working set (16-items) with any node, allowing you to generalize the push down or push up operations of a heap. (Sort both lists. Top16 make a node and stay here. Bottom16 push down and recurse).

This is very very similar to a classic heap but you need a lot of operations so that you have enough work to SIMD.

Sorting is after all, a highly parallelized operation (Bionic Sort, MergePath, etc) and is a good basis for generalizing single threaded data structures into a multi thread or SIMD version.
by snapetom | 2025-08-14 20:03:35+00:00
> Big tech companies like Apple are more meritocratic and generally offer smart people much better deals.

It’s mindblowing how big of a gap this is for these non-tech companies. I work for a company that sold to PE. The owners walked away with the vast majority of a 1.5 billion deal.

I asked if employees were given anything. “Sure. Some got as much as 50k!” I was told.

Using some standard equity math for early engineers, I back of napkined that the 25 year tenure engineers, if they were at big tech, should have gotten low 7 figures. Nope. They got 50k out of 1.5 billion.

(No, PE had no say on how that 1.5 billion was divided up for those of you quick to blame PE.)
by yobbo | 2025-08-14 20:03:48+00:00
I can't find references to HMM-based large language models. Small HMM language models generate gibberish very similar to this.

A HMM consists of a state space, a state transition matrix, and an output probability matrix. A token space of 50k and a state space of something like 60k would have seemed impossible 10-20 years. It has only recently become viable.

Training using Baum-Welch on a big enough text data set would be interesting. It should be much faster than back-propagation with a transformer-model.
by gpm | 2025-08-14 20:04:10+00:00
Is the pain with publishing a subsetted version of the internal monorepo anything but a tooling limitation where things like pushing into that that subsetted version, and merging changes made on the subsetted version, aren't automatic because our tools don't natively understand subsets?

It would require forge integration, but I'd like a world where I could make a PR to `company/open-source-subdir` and the company could merge that PR and that was that without any extra steps because open-source-subdir is just a publicly published subset of the `company` repo.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-08-14 20:04:24+00:00
"adult content" is the boogeyman, to try to make this harder to argue against. The actual net result is shutting down a wide variety of websites and making people identify themselves (to paid identity providers conveniently provided by those who lobbied for this legislation) in order to access others, including Reddit, Discord, etc.

You should not need to identify yourself to access arbitrary websites, either to the website or to some third party.
by andrehacker | 2025-08-14 20:04:44+00:00
As every other thread about LLMs here on HN points out: LLMs are stupid and useless as is. While I don't agree with that sentiment, no company has yet found a way to "do it right" to the extent that investments are justified in the long run. Apple has a history of "being late" and then obliterating the competition with products that are way ahead the early adopters (e.g. MP3 players, smart phones, smart watches).
by skydhash | 2025-08-14 20:04:55+00:00
Hint: They don't

They usually code for the happy path, and add edge cases as bugs are discovered in production. But after a while both happy path and edge cases blend into a ball of mud that you need the correct incantation to get running. And it's a logic maze that contradict every piece of documentation you can find (ticket, emails). Then it quickly become something that people don't dare to touch.
by didibus | 2025-08-14 20:04:57+00:00
Banning the books takes a stance against the books themselves. It's like an attack to the speech of the authors by the government. The government is openly opposing and calling them obscene.

Simply recommending or mandating that a particular set of books should be made available is very different, that's in line with the role they should play here, which is to make sure that a good selection of books for pedagogy is made available to students.

What's funny is, the "banned books" might have not even been available in any of the libraries to begin with. That shows the distinction.

And finally, even the set of books they make available, it should reasonably look like an effort was made to select them based on an objective criteria of offering the best education. If it starts to feel like it wasn't done so in good faith, it's leaning on propaganda. The librarian, school board, governor, this applies to all of them, it's not their own personal selection of what they want the kids to learn. It's a set of books of their good faith effort at objectively offering the material that benefits the kids education best.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-08-14 20:05:35+00:00
I wish Apple would do this. The SoCs in modern iPhones are more than enough to power a desktop OS.

I think the issue is that a unified computing platform would devour a decent amount of their laptop sales, but in the long run I think it would be a superior experience for the user. It really is a political problem and not a technical problem at this point.

Build a monitor with a base to set the iPhone on with wireless charging, you drop the phone on the base and it automatically pairs to the monitor and mouse/keyboard. You can call the system “Apple One” or something similar catchy. There you go Apple, just saved you millions of dollars on product development.
by burnte | 2025-08-14 20:05:41+00:00
You're actually agreeing with me. I'm not blaming social media nor alcohol, and you are not blaming them as well. Regulation hasn't eliminated alcoholism or drunk driving, etc. We need to go back to the days of teaching kids that there are things in the world that are dangerous and prepare them for it, rather than trying to shield them from everything and launching them into the world totally unprepared but ideologically pure.
by Munam | 2025-08-14 20:05:48+00:00
Helped to build this out a little bit. Was really cool to get to play with Cerberus for the first time as well.

I'm really interested in learning more about how devs integrate MCP security into their routine code evals.

I think there's a big opportunity as a space to get tools like this into CI/CD pipelines and workflows.

Happy to answer any questions and happy to hear any feedback!

Thanks for checking it out :)
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-14 20:05:59+00:00
And do what? Say they need to investigate voting machines in <battleground state>, only to have republicans answer "no" and send out the brown shirts while the entirely corrupt federal legislature certified the results anyways?

Voting in the US was already a fragile thing with very little to trust about, purely due to the use of voting machines. Now it's a fully broken system, where no rules are holding up anymore.

The 2026 midterms _will_ be stolen.
by ranabasheer | 2025-08-14 20:06:04+00:00
I agree. The very first demo google gave was their agent making a hair appointment. However, the focus of the current crop of AI services seems to miss out the larger population that still relies on phones to make appointments and other day to day activities. They are focused on MCP, api integration and other device-to-device links that they miss out on device to human link that majority relies on.
by wvenable | 2025-08-14 20:06:13+00:00
> Regardless of whether pornography is, or should be legal, average exposure is now 11 years old.

You make it sound like historically it was much later but actually even in the 1980s 11 years old was common. In fact, that matches my own personal experience from that era.

> Or, another one, “just use parental controls,” have you even tried this?

Parental Controls is the right answer but absolutely agree that parental controls suck. As a parent, I'd love just any level of better control. I don't even care if I have different controls per manufacturer as long they're pretty complete and capable.

If the EU can mandate USB-C, they can mandate all technologies include powerful and capable parental controls.

There is no need for age verification -- parents know how old their children are. Parents are providing children with the devices and often the means of connectivity as well. This is and has always been a parenting problem. If the government wants to assist parents, I'm all for that. But age verification is not the answer.
by michael1999 | 2025-08-14 20:06:36+00:00
I'd refine Doctorow's claims to "Privacy preserving age verification is bullshit in the Common Law Anglo world".

You are completely correct that civil law jurisdictions have already solved this: Germany, Estonia, and many others have the all the requirements: a register of all persons available to the central authority, and crypto infrastructure to make it work.

What's missing from the UK, Canada, USA, etc. is the first part! It is hard to believe if you live in Germany, but there really is no big master list of people in those countries. There are many (many, many) lists, linked badly by many different ids. The tax registry, pension registry, drivers license registry, and visa registry are some of the big ones.

Things could be so much simpler if we had such a thing, but the politics between here and there are basically impossible.
by nayuki | 2025-08-14 20:06:43+00:00
I think this would be a perfect use-case for blind signatures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature

Let's say every citizen has an account with their federal government, and the account can be accessed securely in some reasonable way (password, 2FA, hardware token, etc.).

The government can have a public-private RSA key pair specifically for "At least 18 years old". Once the user is authenticated, he can generate a nonce and a blinding factor, multiply them together to get a blinded random number, and upload that to the government for signing. He takes the signature and unblinds it, then submits the original nonce and unblinded signature to the adult website. The website confirms that the nonce and signature is valid according to the government's public key.

This system raises many questions. For example, preventing replay attacks, so the adult website will reject any nonce being reused, or mandating that a timestamp be a subcomponent of the nonce. There is the un-answerable question of how to handle the case where a legitimate adult offers valid signatures for someone else to use. There is also the question of, to what extent the adult website should be able to keep track of the underlying users (even in a hashed format) to monitor abuse, suspicious users who have too much activity, etc.
by nonethewiser | 2025-08-14 20:07:04+00:00
Well this starts off with a bang:

>In germany we just saw very public rigging of an election for the federal high court of justice.

Not familiar with that but I imagine that is going to be a controversial statement.

Using Russia as a subject is interesting. A western audience is probably a lot less defensive against the idea that Russia rigs their elections. The video looks interesting.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-14 20:07:15+00:00
Sure I can. I just did.

It is not the iOS devs' fault that theZuck makes a shitty app designed to destroy people. It is not iOS that allows theZuck to do that. It is the algorithm created by theZuck's minions. It is the tracking that theZuck's minions have created that feed that algorithm. The iOS devs are playing cat&mouse games with theZuck's minions to not allow iOS to willingly participate in that data collection.

The modern mobile device is an amazing achievement. After all, theZuck came along well before these devices and he and his minions were already up to their shenanigans before their apps were released.

Also, I have none of theZuck's apps on my devices, and do not willingly participate in his shenanigans. I don't have Dorsey's Musky app either, or any of that social crap at all. This forum is the closest to theSocials as I get. My phone is definitely a net positive in my life. You will not convince me otherwise. Because other individuals have made poor choices in their use of the device does not make mine bad. I will agree that theSocials are a net negative for society. So if you want to "fix the glitch", remove theSocials and it'll be clear the devices are a net positive

Edit: Because you clearly edited yours. "Facebook is just a social network. The Facebook app is just code. What matters is how people decide to use them."

This is where we disagree. I fully believe that Facebook et al should be treated exactly as bigTobacco. They have/are deliberately tweaking their product to make it as addictive as possible. This is a knowingly and deliberate act. It is known that they have done studies to see if they have the ability to mess with people's mood/well being. They know the effect their product has on people, and they continue to modify it to be even more effective.
by jll29 | 2025-08-14 20:08:11+00:00
It's been a while since I used UCSD Pascal (in high school, on Apple II boxes with an extra hardware card), so I don't recall the details of the module system there but I'm pretty sure it did not back then permit separate compilation of definitions and implementation files as Modula-2 did (.def and .mod in Modula-2, respectively).

I also saw some ML/SML at uni in the early 1990s but no mention of modules then (this is not to say you are wrong, but I question how visible any work in that space was that may have existed). Now Mesa I never got my hands on, nor do I know anyone that did.

Modula-2 was popular e.g. on the Atari ST 520 series, I still have the handbook on my bookshelf next to me (the vendor of the compiler I had was called "Application Systems Heidelberg", founded in Germany in 1985 they now seem to have gone into gaming). This was a decent 32-bit compiler, and with 1 MB RAM you could write great applications when C compilers at the time were still insufficient in their ability to provide proper type checking support (pre-ANSI/ISO standardization).

Reddit has a discussion on Modula-2 and its family tree here: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1cuam2p/what_e...