CVE-2026-27896
MCP Go SDK Vulnerable to Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity
Impact
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.
Affected packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|---|
| go | github.com/modelcontextprotocol/go-sdk | < 1.3.1 | 1.3.1 |
Affected products
| Vendor | Product | Affected versions |
|---|---|---|
| Lfprojects | Mcp Go Sdk | before 1.3.1 |
Weakness classification
References
- NVD record
- CVE.org record
- GitHub advisory
- https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/go-sdk/commit/7b8d81c264074404abdf5aa16e2cf0c2d9c64cc0
- https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/go-sdk/security/advisories/GHSA-wvj2-96wp-fq3f
- https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-27896
- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2442903
- https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/2026/cve-2026-27896.json
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-wvj2-96wp-fq3f
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-27896