MCP Registry: Stored XSS in catalogue UI via attribute-quote breakout in publisher-controlled `websiteUrl`

Summary

The MCP Registry provides MCP clients with a list of MCP servers, like an app store for MCP servers. Prior to 1.7.7, the public catalogue UI served at GET / (file internal/api/handlers/v0/ui_index.html) is vulnerable to stored cross-site scripting via the server.websiteUrl field of any published server.json. Server-side validation in internal/validators/validators.go (validateWebsiteURL) only checks that the URL parses, is absolute, and uses the https scheme; it does not reject quote characters. Client-side, the value is interpolated into a double-quoted href attribute via innerHTML, using a homegrown escapeHtml helper that performs the standard textContent → innerHTML round-trip. Per the HTML serialisation algorithm, that round-trip encodes only &, <, > and U+00A0 inside text nodes — it does not encode " or '. A literal " in websiteUrl therefore breaks out of the href attribute, allowing arbitrary on* event handlers to be appended to the same <a> element. The Content-Security-Policy on / is script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' https://cdn.tailwindcss.com, so the injected event handlers execute. Any user able to obtain a publish token (e.g. via POST /v0/auth/github-at with their own GitHub account, or POST /v0/auth/none on a deployment that has anonymous auth enabled) can plant a poisoned record visible to every visitor of the registry homepage. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.7.7.

Timeline

1. May 14, 2026, 9:05 PM UTCCVE published
2. May 15, 2026, 2:19 PM UTCCISA SSVC assessment

   Exploitation: poc · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial

3. May 15, 2026, 2:20 PM UTCRecord last updated

Affected versions

• modelcontextprotocol registry

  fixed in 1.7.7

• github.com/modelcontextprotocol/registryGo

  fixed in 1.7.7

References 1