The USB-C Metaphor Hides the Hard Part

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:59:00 +0700

Threat Modeling MCP in the Real World

People like to describe MCP as “USB-C for AI.”

It’s a good line. It explains why people care.

USB-C made hardware interoperability easier. MCP makes tool interoperability easier. Build once, connect everywhere, move faster.

The problem with good metaphors is that they are usually true in one way and dangerously false in another.

USB-C looks like a cable problem. MCP looks like a protocol problem.

But the hard part isn’t the connector. The hard part is delegation.

When an AI client connects to tools through MCP, it is not just moving data. It is moving authority: who can read what, who can trigger what, and under which identity.

That shift is what many threat models miss.

They evaluate MCP like an integration layer, when they should evaluate it like an authorization fabric.

Why this matters now

Standards compress engineering cost. They also compress attacker learning curves.

Before MCP, every integration had custom quirks. That was messy for developers and inconvenient for attackers. With standardization, we gain velocity and lose diversity. A weakness in common implementation patterns becomes reusable across many environments.

This doesn’t mean MCP is unsafe. It means MCP is now important enough to threat model as first-class infrastructure.

The teams that do this early will avoid the coming cycle: rapid adoption, soft defaults, then expensive retrofitting under incident pressure.

Delegated-Authorization on Napat's Inverse Blog

The USB-C Metaphor Hides the Hard Part

Threat Modeling MCP in the Real World

Why this matters now