Search SBIR/STTR awards (federal R&D contracts to small businesses). Find by firm, agency, topic, or year.
AI agents call search_sbir_awards to retrieve information from SBA MCP Server without modifying anything — typically the context-gathering step in research, monitoring, and reporting workflows, before the agent takes action elsewhere.
This tool retrieves and queries publicly available federal R&D contract award data. It performs no writes, deletions, code execution, or financial transactions. The only risk is information disclosure of non-sensitive public records, which has minimal blast radius. Confidence is high because the description clearly indicates read-only search functionality.
From the tool's definition Tool description states 'Search SBIR/STTR awards' and 'Find by firm, agency, topic, or year' — pure query/lookup operations with no modification, deletion, or execution capability.
Attacks that exploit this kind of access
Search SBIR/STTR awards (federal R&D contracts to small businesses). Find by firm, agency, topic, or year. It is categorised as a Read tool in the SBA MCP Server MCP Server, which means it retrieves data without modifying state.
Register the SBA MCP Server MCP server in PolicyLayer and add a rule for search_sbir_awards: allow, deny, rate-limit, or require approval. Point your MCP client at the PolicyLayer proxy URL and the rule is enforced on every call, before it reaches SBA MCP Server. Nothing to install.
search_sbir_awards is a Read tool with low risk. Read-only tools are generally safe to allow by default.
Yes. Add a rate_limit block to the search_sbir_awards rule in your PolicyLayer policy. For example, setting max: 10 and window: 60 limits the tool to 10 calls per minute. Rate limits are tracked per agent session and reset automatically.
Set action: deny in the PolicyLayer policy for search_sbir_awards. The AI agent will receive a policy violation error and cannot call the tool. You can also include a reason field to explain why the tool is blocked.
search_sbir_awards is provided by the SBA MCP Server MCP server (shawndrake2/mcp-sba). PolicyLayer sits as a proxy in front of this server to enforce policies before tool calls reach the server.
Every MCP server has a record like this.
Type a name, get the same breakdown: verified identity, auth posture, risk grade, capabilities, recommended policy.
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