MCP Bridge: A Lightweight, LLM-Agnostic RESTful Proxy for Model Context Protocol Servers
This work addresses the problem of deploying LLM tools in mobile, web, and edge environments for developers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing MCP standards.
The paper tackles the limitations of Model Context Protocol (MCP) implementations, which are impractical for resource-constrained environments, by presenting MCP Bridge, a lightweight RESTful proxy that enables LLM-powered applications in previously inaccessible settings with enhanced security and cross-platform compatibility.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly augmented with external tools through standardized interfaces like the Model Context Protocol (MCP). However, current MCP implementations face critical limitations: they typically require local process execution through STDIO transports, making them impractical for resource-constrained environments like mobile devices, web browsers, and edge computing. We present MCP Bridge, a lightweight RESTful proxy that connects to multiple MCP servers and exposes their capabilities through a unified API. Unlike existing solutions, MCP Bridge is fully LLM-agnostic, supporting any backend regardless of vendor. The system implements a risk-based execution model with three security levels standard execution, confirmation workflow, and Docker isolation while maintaining backward compatibility with standard MCP clients. Complementing this server-side infrastructure is a Python based MCP Gemini Agent that facilitates natural language interaction with MCP tools. The evaluation demonstrates that MCP Bridge successfully addresses the constraints of direct MCP connections while providing enhanced security controls and cross-platform compatibility, enabling sophisticated LLM-powered applications in previously inaccessible environments