12 Best MCP Security Tools: Which Ones See Local Servers on Developer Laptops?
Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers can read your files, your tokens, and your build scripts. When a server runs as a quiet stdio process on a developer laptop, every gateway, proxy, and SIEM that inspects only HTTP traffic loses sight of it. The NSA's Artificial Intelligence Security Center covered this ground in its 20 May 2026 information sheet on MCP security design, which advises keeping data processing local where possible and separating components by trust level. Running a server locally satisfies the first point. It does nothing for the second unless somebody can see the process.