MCP Dev Summit North America

Model Context Protocol servers are increasingly granted access to critical infrastructure from observability systems and databases to code repositories. This access introduces new supply chain security challenges for teams operating MCP servers in real-world environments.

In this talk, we share lessons learned from Chainguard’s experience building MCP infrastructure for production. Starting with mcp-grafana, our first hardened MCP server, we reduced known CVEs to 0 at publish time while shrinking image size by 65%. We developed repeatable security patterns for MCP delivery, including automated rebuilds, attack surface minimization, SBOM generation, and SLSA provenance.

We then applied these same patterns to a different use case: a documentation MCP serving over 1,500 container image guides, enabling secure access through AI assistants. These implementations demonstrate how consistent supply chain controls can support both infrastructure-integrated and content-focused MCP servers.

Attendees will learn practical approaches to threat modeling MCP servers. We’ll also share our challenges and failures, along with open-source workflows the community can adopt across the MCP ecosystem.