## Summary
DNS auth users have repeatedly hit two failure modes that both produce
the same opaque "Ed25519 signature verification failed" error, making
them indistinguishable to debug. This PR makes both diagnosable
end-to-end without changing the auth protocol or any successful path.
The two recurring failure modes:
1. **Wrong placement** — TXT record put under a selector
(`_mcp-auth.<domain>` or `_mcp-registry.<domain>`) instead of the apex.
DKIM-style intuition, but MCP DNS auth uses SPF-style apex placement.
See #385 (PR #388 fixed the docs but the failure recurred), #1103,
#1126.
2. **Stale apex record** — old TXT record left behind after a key
rotation, silently tried first and rejected.
## Changes
**`internal/api/handlers/v0/auth/dns.go`** — when the apex has no
`v=MCPv1` record, probe `_mcp-auth.<domain>` and
`_mcp-registry.<domain>` in parallel (2s individual timeout). If a
record is found there, return a targeted error pointing the user at the
apex. Costs zero extra DNS work in the success path.
**`internal/api/handlers/v0/auth/common.go`** — when verification fails
against records that *are* present, include short fingerprints of every
key the registry tried (`ed25519:YJLsHFhu`-style 8-char prefix). A new
`ErrSignatureMismatch` sentinel keeps structural errors (wrong signature
size, unsupported algorithm) passing through unchanged via `errors.Is`,
so existing assertions on those messages still hold.
**`docs/modelcontextprotocol-io/authentication.mdx`** — anti-pattern
`<Warning>` callout in the DNS section explicitly warning against
selector placement and stale records.
**Tests** — two new tests:
- `TestDNSAuthHandler_WrongSelectorProbe` — verifies the probe surfaces
records found at `_mcp-auth.` / `_mcp-registry.` and falls through to
the standard error when nothing is found anywhere
- `TestDNSAuthHandler_StaleKeyFingerprintInError` — verifies the
fingerprint hint appears in the failure message for #1126's exact
scenario
One existing test assertion was updated from a generic `"signature
verification failed"` substring to the more specific `"invalid signature
size for ECDSA P-384"` it should always have been asserting; the new
sentinel-based logic surfaces structural errors verbatim.
## Test plan
- [x] `make lint` — clean
- [x] `make test-unit` — all auth tests pass (existing + 2 new)
- [x] Verified existing single-key and multi-key paths preserve their
original (more specific) error messages where they were already specific
- [ ] Reviewer to sanity-check the docs callout renders well in the
Mintlify theme
## Out of scope
The publisher-side preflight DNS check (cross-link in #845) is
intentionally **not** in this PR — that belongs in the broader CLI UX
work tracked by #845.
Refs #845, #385, #1103Fixes#1126
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Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
c5f50e817b