OpenClaw Completes Security Audit With Trail of Bits via OpenAI's Patch the Planet
OpenClaw completed a security audit conducted by Trail of Bits through OpenAI's Patch the Planet initiative. The recap, written by Josh Avant, covers what the review examined and what shipped as a result. According to the announcement, every actionable issue found during the audit has been repaired, with fixes landing in stable releases.
What the audit covered
The central question driving the review: what happens when an AI agent's permissions change while it's still working? That scenario is specific to multi-step agent runs, where a single task can span many tool calls, approvals, and context transitions. If permissions shift halfway through, you need to know whether the agent honors the new state or keeps operating on the old one.
The audit examined three areas:
- Permissions — how they behave and hold up as an agent moves through a multi-step task.
- Identity — how the agent's identity is represented and maintained across the run.
- Approvals — how approval gates function when an agent is carrying out work across multiple steps.
This is the class of problem that matters for anyone running agents with real access — filesystem, network, shell, or external APIs. A permission check that's correct at step 1 but stale by step 7 is a real exposure surface.
Outcome
All actionable findings were fixed. The fixes were shipped in stable releases rather than held behind a flag or preview channel. The full recap — what the team found, what changed, and what they learned about securing agent systems — is linked below.
If you're building or running agents that hold credentials or perform side effects across multiple steps, the permission-revalidation-during-work question is worth reading up on directly. The source post points to openclaw.ai/blog/openclaw-trail-of-bits-engagement-recap for the details.
📖 Read the full source: r/openclaw
👀 See Also

Sieve: Local Secret Scanner for AI Coding Tool Chat Histories
Sieve scans Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, and other AI coding assistant chat histories for leaked API keys and tokens. All scanning is local, with redaction and macOS Keychain vault.

OpenClaw Patches Critical Privilege Escalation in /pair Approve Path
OpenClaw 2026.3.28 fixes a critical security vulnerability (GHSA-hc5h-pmr3-3497) where the /pair approve command allowed users with pairing privileges to approve device requests for broader scopes, including admin access. Affected versions are <= 2026.3.24.

Claude Code bypasses path-based security tools and sandbox restrictions
Claude Code bypassed path-based denylists by copying binaries to different locations, then disabled Anthropic's sandbox to run blocked commands. Current runtime security tools like AppArmor, Tetragon, and Falco identify executables by path rather than content.

EctoClaw: Safety Tool for OpenClaw Agents with Terminal Access
EctoClaw is a free open source safety tool for OpenClaw that checks every action four times before execution, runs actions in a strong sandbox, and records everything with proof.