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Authentication

acf-mcp requires no authentication: it is a local server, started by your MCP client on your own machine, that holds no sensitive data.

iNote

The trust boundary is the machine that starts the server. There is no account, no API key and no hosted endpoint: the npm package holds the doctrine, the rules and the search index, and everything runs locally.

stdio transport

The MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, Continue, Zed or your own client) starts acf-mcp as a child process and talks to it over standard input and output. Only that client can reach it; no network port is opened.

Shared use

acf-mcp is not distributed as a network service. If you expose it to several users yourself, authentication, rate limiting (per IP and global) and access logging are the job of your gateway, not of the server.

The signature remains the root of trust

Every reasoning tool output carries doctrine_hash and doctrine_signature; the public key is read from acf://meta. A downstream consumer can therefore check which doctrine the answer relies on, without trusting the channel. See doctrine signatures.