GHSA-WVJ2-96WP-FQ3F

Vulnerability from github – Published: 2026-02-26 22:20 – Updated: 2026-02-26 22:20
VLAI?
Summary
MCP Go SDK Vulnerable to Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity
Details

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.

Severity ?
7.0 (High)
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:N/SC:H/SI:H/SA:N
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{
  "affected": [
    {
      "package": {
        "ecosystem": "Go",
        "name": "github.com/modelcontextprotocol/go-sdk"
      },
      "ranges": [
        {
          "events": [
            {
              "introduced": "0"
            },
            {
              "fixed": "1.3.1"
            }
          ],
          "type": "ECOSYSTEM"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "aliases": [
    "CVE-2026-27896"
  ],
  "database_specific": {
    "cwe_ids": [
      "CWE-178",
      "CWE-436"
    ],
    "github_reviewed": true,
    "github_reviewed_at": "2026-02-26T22:20:08Z",
    "nvd_published_at": "2026-02-26T01:16:25Z",
    "severity": "HIGH"
  },
  "details": "The Go MCP SDK used Go\u0027s standard encoding/json.Unmarshal for JSON-RPC and MCP protocol message parsing. Go\u0027s standard library performs case-insensitive matching of JSON keys to struct field tags \u2014 a field tagged json:\"method\" would also match \"Method\", \"METHOD\", etc. Additionally, Go\u0027s standard library folds the Unicode characters \u017f (U+017F) and K (U+212A) to their ASCII equivalents s and k, meaning fields like \"param\u017f\" would match \"params\". This violated the JSON-RPC 2.0 specification, which defines exact field names.\n\n#### Impact:\n\nA 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:\n  - **Bypassing intermediary inspection:** Proxies or policy layers that matched on exact field names may have failed to detect or filter these messages.\n  - **Cross-implementation inconsistency:** Other MCP SDKs (TypeScript, Python) use case-sensitive parsing and would reject the same messages, creating potential security-boundary confusion.\n\n####  Fix:\n\nGo\u0027s 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.\n\n#### Credits:\nMCP Go SDK thanks Francesco Lacerenza (Doyensec) for reporting this issue.",
  "id": "GHSA-wvj2-96wp-fq3f",
  "modified": "2026-02-26T22:20:08Z",
  "published": "2026-02-26T22:20:08Z",
  "references": [
    {
      "type": "WEB",
      "url": "https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/go-sdk/security/advisories/GHSA-wvj2-96wp-fq3f"
    },
    {
      "type": "ADVISORY",
      "url": "https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-27896"
    },
    {
      "type": "WEB",
      "url": "https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/go-sdk/commit/7b8d81c264074404abdf5aa16e2cf0c2d9c64cc0"
    },
    {
      "type": "PACKAGE",
      "url": "https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/go-sdk"
    }
  ],
  "schema_version": "1.4.0",
  "severity": [
    {
      "score": "CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:N/SC:H/SI:H/SA:N",
      "type": "CVSS_V4"
    }
  ],
  "summary": "MCP Go SDK Vulnerable to Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity"
}


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