modelcontextprotocol / modelcontextprotocol/python-sdk

Trailing slash in OAuthMetadata's `issuer` causes issues with clients

Open
#1,919 5 comments 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

auth bug P1 ready for work
Dominant language
Python
Stars
24.3k
Forks
4k
Avg merge
1d 1h
Merged PRs (30d)
31

Description

Initial Checks
Description

In the .well-known/oauth-authorization-server endpoint and , the issuer is forced to always contain a trailing slash e.g.,

  • https://your-mcp.com/ instead of
  • https://your-mcp.com
    as a byproduct of using pydantic's AnyHttpUrl type.

This causes issues in both Google's ADK and IBM's MCP Context Forge because:

  • when building the .well-known URL, they expect a discovery issuer URL that does not contain a trailing slash; and
  • then they MUST verify that the returned metadata issuer URL is identical to the discovery issuer URL ("authorization server's issuer identifier value" in the spec) according to RFC 8414 Section 3.2; so
  • when OAuthMetadata.issuer contains the trailing slash, the discovery process is aborted.

OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server Metadata spec says that the client MUST remove trailing paths from when the issuer contains a path component:

If the issuer identifier value contains a path component, any
terminating "/" MUST be removed before inserting "/.well-known/" and
the well-known URI suffix between the host component and the path
component.
-- https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8414#section-3.1

if the trailing / in https://example.com/ is a "path component", and should thus be stripped by the client, so I think the spec is ambiguous about the responsibilities of the client in the case where there the issuer identifier value contains a lone trailing slash.

I did note that the examples of issuer identifiers in the spec do not contain a lone trailing slash, i.e. they are https://example.com rather than https://example.com/.

For these reasons, and

  • while it's listed as the client's responsibility to remove trailing slashes from the issuer identifier,
  • I don't believe it's the server implementation's responsibility to intentionally make it harder for clients by returning a URL that do not follow the assumptions in the spec.

I think it's worth it to consider interpreting the spec as "the issuer field should not contain a trailing slash".

I also believe this issue could be similar in mechanism, but different in scope, to what is described in https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/python-sdk/issues/1265

Example Code
# A demonstration on how AnyHttpUrl adds a trailing slash.

>>> from pydantic.networks import AnyHttpUrl
>>> x = AnyHttpUrl("http://localhost:8000")
>>> x
AnyHttpUrl('http://localhost:8000/')
>>> str(x)
'http://localhost:8000/'
>>>
Python & MCP Python SDK
Python 3.14
mcp==1.25.0

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start at the OAuthMetadata model and the .well-known/oauth-authorization-server endpoint, then inspect how Pydantic's AnyHttpUrl normalizes the issuer value. Check the RFC 8414 requirements and the existing issue discussion before deciding the expected handling of a lone trailing slash; done means the returned issuer and discovery URL remain compatible with affected clients.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
api, authentication
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
58/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.