Add Authorization Flow for MCP client server hosts extension

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Quiet

Research direction

Start by reading the main Authorization specification and the replaced issue 2178, then review how the proposed extension relates to confidential OIDC clients, REST servers, and internal MCP clients. Done means producing a concrete extension candidate that addresses the described authorization flow; the issue does not yet identify files or tests.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement

This feature request replaces the closed https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/modelcontextprotocol/issues/2178 issue with an extension candidate proposal as recommended by @localden.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When a REST server that signs in users with an authorization code flow and requests a user authorization to let it access an MCP server on the user's behalf, it can acquire an access token with a correct MCP server audience and propagate it with the internal MCP client to access a secured MCP server.

Currently, the MCP authorization specification covers AI assistant like flows where a user login is initiated per every imported secured MCP server in an interactive mode - something that can not work in scope of requests to confidential OIDC clients that run as REST servers and use an AI service with a pre-configured MCP client internally.

Describe the solution you'd like

Introduce an extension to the Authorization flow specified in the main Authorization specification

Dominant language
MDX
Stars
164
Forks
54
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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