MCP Go SDK Vulnerable to Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity
Date: 2026-02
Affected: go/github.com/modelcontextprotocol/go-sdk
Attack vector: deserialization
Category: vulnerability-disclosure
Severity: High
CVE: CVE-2026-27896
CWE: CWE-178
CWE-436

The Go MCP SDK used Go's standard encoding/json.Unmarshal for JSON-RPC and MCP protocol message parsing. Go's standard library performs case-insensitive matching of JSON keys to struct field tags — a field tagged json:"method" would also match "Method", "METHOD", etc. Additionally, Go's standard library folds the Unicode characters ſ (U+017F) and K (U+212A) to their ASCII equivalents s and k, meaning fields like "paramſ" would match "params". This violated the JSON-RPC 2.0 specification, which defines exact field names. #### Impact: A malicious MCP peer may have been able to send protocol messages with non-standard field casing (e.g., "Method" instead of "method") that the SDK would silently accept. This had the potential for: - **Bypassing intermediary inspection:** Proxies or policy layers that matched on exact field names may have failed to detect or filter these messages. - **Cross-implementation inconsistency:** Other MCP SDKs (TypeScript, Python) use case-sensitive parsing and would reject the same messages, creating potential security-boundary confusion. #### Fix: Go's standard JSON unmarshaling was replaced with a case-sensitive decoder (github.com/segmentio/encoding) in commit 7b8d81c. Users are advised to update to v1.3.1 to resolve this issue. #### Credits: MCP Go SDK thanks Francesco Lacerenza (Doyensec) for reporting this issue.


Mitigations:

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):