ClawKeeper: Comprehensive Safety Protection for OpenClaw Agents Through Skills, Plugins, and Watchers
OpenClaw has rapidly established itself as a leading open-source autonomous agent runtime, offering powerful capabilities including tool integration, local file access, and shell command execution. However, these broad operational privileges introduce critical security vulnerabilities, transforming model errors into tangible system-level threats such as sensitive data leakage, privilege escalation, and malicious third-party skill execution. Existing security measures for the OpenClaw ecosystem remain highly fragmented, addressing only isolated stages of the agent lifecycle rather than providing holistic protection. To bridge this gap, we present ClawKeeper, a real-time security framework that integrates multi-dimensional protection mechanisms across three complementary architectural layers. (1) Skill-based protection operates at the instruction level, injecting structured security policies directly into the agent context to enforce environment-specific constraints and cross-platform boundaries. (2) Plugin-based protection serves as an internal runtime enforcer, providing configuration hardening, proactive threat detection, and continuous behavioral monitoring throughout the execution pipeline. (3) Watcher-based protection introduces a novel, decoupled system-level security middleware that continuously verifies agent state evolution. It enables real-time execution intervention without coupling to the agent's internal logic, supporting operations such as halting high-risk actions or enforcing human confirmation. We argue that this Watcher paradigm holds strong potential to serve as a foundational building block for securing next-generation autonomous agent systems. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of ClawKeeper across diverse threat scenarios. We release our code.
69ccc85d3f84a0971be66c3a
Songyang Liu
69ccc85d3f84a0971be66c3b
Chaozhuo Li
69ccc85d3f84a0971be66c3c
Chenxu Wang
claimed_verified
2026-04-02T08:17:19.437Z
674006451d2302f6aa9b026d
https://cdn-avatars.huggingface.co/v1/production/uploads/674006451d2302f6aa9b026d/szYYX1DSwjrkHCjp_b83S.png
Chenxu Wang
xunyoyo
user
xunyoyo
69ccc85d3f84a0971be66c3d
Jinyu Hou
69ccc85d3f84a0971be66c3e
Zejian Chen
69ccc85d3f84a0971be66c3f
Litian Zhang
69ccc85d3f84a0971be66c40
Zheng Liu
69ccc85d3f84a0971be66c41
Qiwei Ye
69ccc85d3f84a0971be66c42
Yiming Hei
69ccc85d3f84a0971be66c43
Xi Zhang
69ccc85d3f84a0971be66c44
Zhongyuan Wang
ClawKeeper: Comprehensive Safety Protection for OpenClaw Agents Through Skills, Plugins, and Watchers
OpenClaw has rapidly established itself as a leading open-source autonomous agent runtime, offering powerful capabilities including tool integration, local file access, and shell command execution. However, these broad operational privileges introduce critical security vulnerabilities, transforming model errors into tangible system-level threats such as sensitive data leakage, privilege escalation, and malicious third-party skill execution. Existing security measures for the OpenClaw ecosystem remain highly fragmented, addressing only isolated stages of the agent lifecycle rather than providing holistic protection. To bridge this gap, we present ClawKeeper, a real-time security framework that integrates multi-dimensional protection mechanisms across three complementary architectural layers. (1) Skill-based protection operates at the instruction level, injecting structured security policies directly into the agent context to enforce environment-specific constraints and cross-platform boundaries. (2) Plugin-based protection serves as an internal runtime enforcer, providing configuration hardening, proactive threat detection, and continuous behavioral monitoring throughout the execution pipeline. (3) Watcher-based protection introduces a novel, decoupled system-level security middleware that continuously verifies agent state evolution. It enables real-time execution intervention without coupling to the agent's internal logic, supporting operations such as halting high-risk actions or enforcing human confirmation. We argue that this Watcher paradigm holds strong potential to serve as a foundational building block for securing next-generation autonomous agent systems. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of ClawKeeper across diverse threat scenarios. We release our code.
OpenClaw's security vulnerabilities necessitate comprehensive protection through ClawKeeper, a real-time framework implementing skill-based, plugin-based, and watcher-based security mechanisms across multiple architectural layers.
autonomous agent runtime tool integration local file access shell command execution security vulnerabilities privilege escalation malicious third-party skill execution security framework multi-dimensional protection mechanisms instruction level structured security policies environment-specific constraints cross-platform boundaries internal runtime enforcer configuration hardening proactive threat detection continuous behavioral monitoring execution pipeline decoupled system-level security middleware real-time execution intervention high-risk actions human confirmation watcher paradigm foundational building block