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agentcore-mcp-oauth-facade

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Updated 10-16 05:00

About this skill

AgentCore MCP OAuth Facade

Bedrock AgentCore Gateway and Runtime expose MCP endpoints, but real-world MCP clients expect a complete OAuth 2.0 + MCP implementation: RFC 9728 protected resource metadata, RFC 8414 authorization server metadata, Dynamic Client Registration, arbitrary loopback redirect URIs, Mcp-Session-Id continuity, SSE responses, and un-paginated tool lists. Neither Cognito nor AgentCore Gateway provides all of that out of the box.

This skill captures a production-tested pattern: a small stateless Lambda facade (CloudFront → HTTP API → Lambda) that bridges every gap while never issuing tokens itself — Cognito remains the issuer, and the Gateway's JWT authorizer validates tokens unchanged.

MCP client (Claude Code / Cursor / Quick / mcp-remote)
    │  OAuth discovery, /oauth/authorize, /oauth/token, /register, /mcp
    ▼
OAuth Facade  (CloudFront → HTTP API $default stage → Lambda)
    │  injects routing session-id, rewrites tool names, aggregates pages,
    │  re-wraps JSON as SSE, synthesizes Mcp-Session-Id
    ▼
AgentCore Gateway (CUSTOM_JWT authorizer) ──► Lambda target ──► tools

When to Apply

Reference this skill when:

  • Putting Bedrock AgentCore Gateway or Runtime behind OAuth for third-party MCP clients (Claude Code, Cursor, Amazon Quick, anything built on mcp-remote).
  • An MCP client's connect wizard fails with a manual-credentials form (e.g. Quick's "Fix highlighted fields") — almost always a broken discovery chain.
  • Tools past the first 30 are missing from tools/list — Gateway pagination that the client never follows.
  • Tool calls intermittently return 404 "no valid session" or -32602 Unknown tool after migrating from an MCP Runtime to AgentCore Gateway.
  • Cognito must serve clients that expect DCR (RFC 7591) or arbitrary redirect_uri values.

Not for: general AgentCore service setup (Gateway targets, Runtime deployment, IAM) — see the aws-agentic-ai skill for that.

How It Works

The facade solves three groups of problems. Each has a deep-dive reference:

1. OAuth discovery and Cognito gap-filling

Cognito supports OAuth flows but is an incomplete OIDC provider for MCP purposes: no DCR API, metadata only under Cognito's own domain, registered redirect URIs only. The facade:

  1. Serves three metadata documents at the root domain (CloudFront exists purely to give a clean root — some clients do not support path-prefixed discovery): RFC 9728 protected-resource, RFC 8414 authorization-server, and OIDC openid-configuration. Interactive endpoints point at the facade; issuer and jwks_uri stay on the real Cognito issuer so token validation is untouched.
  2. Serves each document at both the bare path and the path-insertion variant (/.well-known/openid-configuration/mcp) — clients probe both.
  3. Implements fake DCR: POST /register echoes the request and returns a pre-provisioned public client ID (201). No Cognito API call needed.
  4. Rewrites redirect_uri: the client's original {redirect_uri, state} is packed into an HMAC-SHA256-signed state (10-min max age), Cognito always sees the facade's single registered callback, and the callback handler verifies the signature and bounces the code back to the client's real redirect URI. The facade stays fully stateless — no session store.
  5. Injects the resource-server scope during /oauth/authorize (union with what the client asked for) — Gateway enforces scopes per tools/call, and generic clients only request openid email.

See references/oauth-discovery-and-dcr.md.

2. MCP session and protocol bridging

AgentCore uses two unrelated session identifiers:

Header Owner Purpose
X-Amzn-Bedrock-AgentCore-Runtime-Session-Id AgentCore platform Container routing key, must be ≥ 33 chars
Mcp-Session-Id MCP protocol Protocol session continuity

The facade mints a fresh routing key per request (facade-<uuid4hex>, 39 chars) and passes the protocol header through untouched — with one surgical exception: if the upstream echoes the injected routing key back as an mcp-session-id response header (AgentCore does this on session-less responses), the facade suppresses that echo. Spec-compliant clients adopt any new Mcp-Session-Id they see, so the un-suppressed echo poisons the client's session and every later call 404s.

Gateway itself is stateless and never returns an Mcp-Session-Id, but strict clients require one from initialize — so the facade synthesizes a stable one. It also re-wraps Gateway's application/json responses as single-event SSE when the client sent Accept: text/event-stream, answers GET /mcp with an empty SSE stream (Gateway 405s it, and mcp-remote retries forever), and converts scope-403s into 401 + WWW-Authenticate so clients re-authenticate instead of retry-looping.

See references/mcp-session-and-protocol-bridging.md.

3. Gateway pagination and schema limits

  • tools/list pagination (the big one): Gateway returns at most 30 tools per page plus nextCursor. Many MCP clients never follow the cursor, so tool #31 onward silently vanishes. The facade intercepts tools/list and walks the cursor chain server-side (bounded loop), returning one merged page with no nextCursor.
  • Tool name prefix: Gateway exposes every tool as {targetName}___{toolName}. The facade strips the prefix on the way in (tools/list) and re-adds it on the way out (tools/call), so clients and internal callers keep using bare names. Every code path that talks to the Gateway directly (not through the proxy) must add the prefix itself.
  • Input schema whitelist: Gateway's create_gateway_target accepts only type/properties/required/items/description in tool schemas. Pydantic output (title, default, additionalProperties, anyOf from Optional[...]) must be stripped and anyOf flattened to the first non-null branch.
  • No null arguments: Gateway validates tools/call arguments against the schema and rejects null for typed optionals (FastMCP tolerated them). Drop None values before calling.

See references/gateway-pagination-and-limits.md — includes the Lambda-target pattern (reusing live FastMCP tool registrations, generating the Gateway payload from them) and Custom Resource lifecycle gotchas.

Usage

Adoption checklist when fronting a Gateway with a facade:

  1. Discovery first. Implement all three well-known documents (plus /mcp path-insertion variants) before debugging anything else. A single 404 in the chain silently downgrades clients to manual-credential forms.
  2. Never break the token chain. Facade endpoints for interaction only; issuer/jwks_uri must remain the real IdP so the Gateway authorizer works unchanged.
  3. Handle both session-ids. Mint a ≥33-char routing key per request; never let it leak into Mcp-Session-Id.
  4. Aggregate tools/list. Assume clients do not paginate.
  5. Test with a real strict MCP client, not curl. curl doesn't demand session-ids, doesn't request SSE, brings its own scopes, and never paginates — it passes while every real client fails. All six Gateway-vs-FastMCP differences in this skill were invisible to curl.
  6. Regenerate the tool payload on every tool-surface change, or the Gateway keeps broadcasting the stale tool list.

References