When Agents Look Like Beacons: NIDS Evasion by Model Context Protocol Traffic
[Kryptografia i bezpieczeństwo] Autorzy: Muhammad Abdullah Sohail
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes communication between autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents and remote tools over Streamable HTTP. This shift introduces a class of machine-generated, authenticated, and high-frequency JSON-RPC traffic directly into enterprise networks. Enterprise network defenders have historically relied on machine-like cadence as an Indicator of Compromise (IoC). In this study, we show that without explicit network-layer indication, MCP traffic structurally and temporally resembles Command and Control (C2) beaconing behavior, specifically the polling architectures used by advanced persistent threats like Cobalt Strike. Counter to theoretical assumptions about machine-generated polling, our measurements reveal a visibility gap: standard enterprise Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and behavioral beacon-scoring frameworks do not classify MCP remote…
- Kategoria arxiv
- cs.CR
- Kategoria
- Kryptografia i bezpieczeństwo