The MCP ecosystem
needed a referee.
We built MCPAmpel because LLM agents now install whatever the model recommends, and the model recommends whatever has stars. That's not a security model. So we made the boring one — sixteen scanners, fixed weights, one light.
A trust-light for every MCP server you might install — published methodology, open scoring, German skepticism.
We believe MCP needs a TÜV,
not a leaderboard.
A leaderboard rewards popularity. A TÜV — Germany's vehicle inspection — rewards meeting the same boring criteria as everything else. We're firmly in camp two.
Open methodology, always
Every weight, every rule, every CVSS bucket is published in the public repo. If you can't reproduce a score on your own machine, it doesn't count as a verdict.
PUBLIC · MIT-LICENSEDBoring math beats clever models
Sixteen sub-scores, fixed weights, one published nonlinearity. No learned model, no per-server tuning. We trust auditable arithmetic over benchmark-tuned vibes.
NO ML · NO HEURISTICSThe light is for humans
Red, amber, green. A four-year-old understands it. A CTO understands it. Scores are a tool; the light is the verdict — and that's what goes on the README badge.
UNAMBIGUOUS · LEGIBLEThe agent will install whatever you let it.
In April 2026, the median Anthropic-Claude user has 11 MCP servers installed. Most were added by the agent itself, on the user's behalf, to "solve a task". Many were typo-squat copies. Some leaked credentials. A few were actively malicious.
The npm and pip ecosystems took twenty years to develop social and tooling infrastructure for trust — registries, signing, CVE feeds, security advisories, audit programs. The MCP ecosystem is six months old and growing exponentially. It will not survive its first major supply-chain incident without infrastructure to point at.
MCPAmpel is one piece of that infrastructure. Not the only piece, not the most important — but a piece. A trust-light at the moment of install. A second opinion before the agent runs npm install with your credentials in scope.
Where we are so far.
One person in a Dresden Hinterhof.
Nikita Frikh-Khar
HackTheBox Elite Hacker, ranked #16 in Germany. 2x top-5 solo CTF finisher. Reported vulnerabilities to NASA, John Deere, and X/xAI.
Runs IT for two companies. Built their security stack from scratch and blocked real attacks. Built MCPAmpel because AI agents run with real permissions and nobody was checking.
From a side-project to a standard.
Want to talk methodology?
We answer every email. Especially the skeptical ones.