Guidance on handling per-user credentials for a remote MCP server acting as a proxy to multiple APIs

[kaheidt]

Pre-submission Checklist

• I have checked that this question would not be more appropriate as an issue in a specific repository
• I have searched existing discussions and documentation for answers

Question Category

• Protocol Specification
• SDK Usage
• Server Implementation
• General Implementation
• Documentation
• Other

Your Question

We currently run an enterprise MCP server that exposes tools for multiple APIs (GitHub, Slack, Rally, New Relic, PagerDuty, etc.). Today, each user launches the MCP server locally via STDIO, supplying their user-specific API keys as environment variables at startup.

We’d like to transition to offering this MCP server as a remote service (following our standard deployment lifecycle), so users don’t need to maintain local versions to benefit from updates. The challenge:

• Each upstream API requires user-specific credentials (API keys or OAuth tokens).
• If the upstream API supports OAuth, use of OAuth On-Behalf-Of (OBO) token exchange (RFC 8693) is not feasible since there isn't a means of establishing a trusted relationship between the two identity providers
• The MCP spec discourages passing OAuth tokens through to avoid the confused deputy problem, but it doesn’t seem to explicitly forbid passing credentials via custom headers for mapping to the correct upstream identity.
• Alternatively, we could implement secure storage for per-user credentials, populated via an explicit tool call or an out-of-band process.

Questions:

1. Does the MCP spec intend to define a standard for handling per-user credentials when the MCP server acts as a proxy?
2. Is passing credentials via custom headers acceptable under the spec, or is this considered a security anti-pattern?
3. Are there recommended patterns for multi-user remote MCP servers that need to maintain user context for upstream API calls?

In my opinion, the spec could benefit from guidance on multi-user scenarios and how an MCP server should behave as a proxy in a way that preserves user context securely.

EDIT
I did a little more digging and landed at Proposal: Fine-Grained Resource Control for Multi-User Authorization which seemed somewhat related, but that lead me to PR 475, which then lead to open PR 887: SEP-1036: URL Mode Elicitation for secure out-of-band interactions. It looks like the solution is to essentially use elicitations to have the client open a browser that allows the user to enter a key into some, essentially doing the secure storage alternative I mentioned above. Is that accurate?