Security
What MCPOrbit does, and doesn't do, with your data.
Short story: it's a desktop app. Your prompts and responses never touch our servers, and your API keys are stored encrypted and go only to the provider you picked. Here is the long version.
Code-signed and notarized.
- Apple silicon build (arm64). There is no Intel build.
- Signed with our own Apple Developer ID certificate (Unprototyped limited, Team ID JEERG6R9KV).
- Notarized with Apple's notary service — no Gatekeeper warnings.
- No right-click-to-open, no xattr -d com.apple.quarantine.
No telemetry by default.
- MCPOrbit ships with telemetry off.
- An opt-in pipeline is on the roadmap for the Popular MCP Servers report.
- When it ships, the public schema lives at /privacy/telemetry. Every field is documented there.
- Opt-in is opt-in: equal-weight UI, one-click delete, no payloads ever (no prompts, no args, no responses, no env values).
Updates over a signed channel.
- Auto-updates via electron-updater against DigitalOcean Spaces.
- Update artefacts are signed with the same certificate as the app.
- MCPOrbit refuses to apply an unsigned update.
Where your data goes
What stays on your machine. What leaves.
Stays local
- AI provider API keys (encrypted at rest)
- Saved connections, including MCP server credentials
- Comparison configs
- Tool-call logs
- Environment variable values
- Recent prompts
Encrypted at rest means Electron safeStorage, which is Keychain-backed on macOS. Only AI provider keys get that treatment today. Everything else in this list is written unencrypted to MCPOrbit's local data file.
Leaves your machine
- Tool calls hit your MCP servers (your traffic, your contracts)
- Tool calls hit your model providers (your API keys, your bill)
- Auto-update polls the update server for a manifest
- Eventually: opt-in telemetry — metadata only, never payloads
Verify it yourself
Don't take our word for the network behaviour.
MCPOrbit is proprietary software, so you can't read the source — but you can check the claims on this page directly. Point a network monitor at the app and watch where it does and doesn't connect.
Vulnerability disclosure
Found something? Tell us.
Use the form at mcporbit.com/contact and pick the security topic. Please do send it. The form works, and what you send is written down and kept, address and message as you typed them, so your report is not going into a void. What we will not promise is a fast read. We have never measured how long one of these takes to reach a person, so we are not going to quote you a number, and you should assume it may sit for a while. That is a gap on our side to close, not a reason to hold your finding. Mail to mcporbit.com is refused, so the form is the way in.
Security FAQ
Is MCPOrbit SOC2 / ISO 27001 / HIPAA compliant?
Not today. MCPOrbit is a desktop client; it doesn't process your data on a server we control. The compliance frameworks designed for SaaS don't map cleanly. If you have a specific compliance question, send it through the contact form and we will answer it honestly.
Where are my API keys stored?
It depends which key, and the honest answer is not the same for both. AI provider API keys are encrypted with Electron safeStorage, which is Keychain-backed on macOS; the ciphertext lives in ~/Library/Application Support/MCPOrbit/ai-config.json. Credentials for the MCP servers you connect to — bearer tokens and API keys you paste into a connection — and environment variable values are stored unencrypted in mcporbit-data.json in that same folder. Neither is ever sent over the network, but treat that data file as sensitive.
Does MCPOrbit run with elevated privileges?
No. Standard user-level installation, no sudo, no kernel extension.
What about supply chain?
Releases are built with npm ci against a committed package-lock.json, so the dependency tree that ships is the locked one and not whatever resolved that day. Two things we should be straight about: our package.json uses caret ranges rather than exact pins, and npm audit is not a step in the release pipeline. Both are ours to fix. And because the source is closed there is no public repository to check any of this against, so the part you can verify yourself is the network behaviour described above.
