[ggrab]

IMO the security pitchforking on OpenClaw is just so overdone. People without consideration for the implications will inevitably get burned, as we saw with the reddit posts "Agentic Coding tool X wiped my hard drive and apologized profusely". I work at a FAANG and every time you try something innovative the "policy people" will climb out of their holes and put random roadblocks in your way, not for the sake of actual security (that would be fine but would require actual engagement) but just to feel important, it reminds me of that.

[throwaway_z0om]

> the "policy people" will climb out of their holes

I am one of those people and I work at a FANG.

And while I know it seems annoying, these teams are overwhelmed with not only innovators but lawyers asking so many variations of the same question it's pretty hard to get back to the innovators with a thumbs up or guidance.

Also there is a real threat here. The "wiped my hard drive" story is annoying but it's a toy problem. An agent with database access exfiltrating customer PII to a model endpoint is a horrific outcome for impacted customers and everyone in the blast radius.

That's the kind of thing keeping us up at night, not blocking people for fun.

I'm actively trying to find a way we can unblock innovators to move quickly at scale, but it's a bit of a slow down to go fast moment. The goal isn't roadblocks, it's guardrails that let you move without the policy team being a bottleneck on every request.

[madeofpalk]

I know it’s what the security folk think about, exfiltrating to a model endpoint is the least of my concerns.

I work on commercial OSS. My fear is that it’s exfiltrated to public issues or code. It helpfully commits secrets or other BS like that. And that’s even ignoring prompt injection attacks from the public.

[mikkupikku]

I am sure there are many good corporate security policy people doing important work. But then there are people like this;

I get handed an application developed by my company for use by partner companies. It's a java application, shipped as a jar, nothing special. It gets signed by our company, but anybody with the wherewithal can pull the jar apart and mod the application however they wish. One of the partner companies has already done so, extensively, and come back to show us their work. Management at my company is impressed and asks me to add official plugin support to the application. Can you guess where this is going?

I add the plugin support,the application will now load custom jars that implement the plugin interface I had discussed with devs from that company that did the modding. They think it's great, management thinks its great, everything works and everybody is happy. At the last minute some security policy wonk throws on the brakes. Will this load any plugin jar? Yes. Not good! It needs to only load plugins approved by the company. Why? Because! Never mind that the whole damn application can be unofficially nodded with ease. I ask him how he wants that done, he says only load plugins signed by the company. Retarded, but fine. I do so. He approves it, then the partner company engineer who did the modding chimes in that he's just going to mod the signature check out, because he doesn't want to have to deal with this shit. Security asshat from my company has a melt down and long story short the entire plugin feature, which was already complete, gets scrapped and the partner company just keeps modding the application as before. Months of my life down the drain. Thanks guys, great job protecting... something.

[chrisjj]

> I'm actively trying to find a way we can unblock innovators to move quickly at scale

So did "Move fast and break things" not work out? /i

[Myrmornis]

The main problem with many IT and security people at many tech companies is that they communicate in a way that betrays their belief that they are superior to their colleagues.

"unlock innovators" is a very mild example; perhaps you shouldn't be a jailor in your metaphors?

[latexr]

> People without consideration for the implications will inevitably get burned

They will also burn other people, which is a big problem you can’t simply ignore.

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...

But even if they only burned themselves, you’re talking as if that isn’t a problem. We shouldn’t be handing explosives to random people on the street because “they’ll only blow their own hands”.

[whyoh]

>IMO the security pitchforking on OpenClaw is just so overdone.

Isn't the whole selling point of OpenClaw that you give it valuable (personal) data to work on, which would typically also be processed by 3rd party LLMs?

The security and privacy implications are massive. The only way to use it "safely" is by not giving it much of value.

[muyuu]

There's the selling point of using it as a relatively untrustworthy agent that has access to all the resources on a particular computer and limited access to online tools to its name. Essentially like Claude Code or OpenCode but with its own computer, which means it doesn't constantly hit roadblocks when attempting to uselegacy interfaces meant for humans. Which is... most things to do with interfaces, of course.

[H8crilA]

This may be a good place to exchange some security ideas. I've configured my OpenClaw in a Proxmox VM, firewalled it off of my home network so that it can only talk to the open Internet, and don't store any credentials that aren't necessary. Pretty much only the needed API keys and Signal linked device credentials. The models that can run locally do run locally, for example Whisper for voice messages or embeddings models for semantic search.

[embedding-shape]

I think the security worries are less about the particular sandbox or where it runs, and more about that if you give it access to your Telegram account, it can exfiltrate data and cause other issues. But if you never hand it access to anything, obviously it won't be able to do any damage, unless you instruct it to.

[stavros]

I was worried about the security risk of running it on my infrastructure, so I made my own:

https://github.com/skorokithakis/stavrobot

At least I can run this whenever, and it's all entirely sandboxed, with an architecture that still means I get the features. I even have some security tradeoffs like "you can ask the bot to configure plugin secrets for convenience, or you can do it yourself so it can never see them".

You're not going to be able to prevent the bot from exfiltrating stuff, but at least you can make sure it can't mess with its permissions and give itself more privileges.

[CuriouslyC]

If you're really into optimizing:

You don't need to store any credentials at all (aside from your provider key, unless you want to mod pi).

Your claw also shouldn't be able to talk to the open internet, it should be on a VPN with a filtering proxy and a webhook relay.

[dakolli]

Genuinely curious, what are you doing with OpenClaw that genuinely improves your life?

The security concerns are valid, I can get anyone running one of these agents on their email inbox to dump a bunch of privileged information with a single email..

[sa-code]

> every time you try something innovative the "policy people" will climb out of their holes and put random roadblocks in your way

This is so relatable. I remember trying to set up an LLM gateway back in 2023. There were at least 3 different teams that blocked our rollout for months until they worked through their backlog. "We're blocking you, but you’ll have to chase and nag us for us to even consider unblocking you"

At the end of all that waiting, nothing changed. Each of those teams wrote a document saying they had a look and were presumably just happy to be involved somehow?

[miki123211]

I think you should read "the Phoenix project."

One of the lessons in that book is that the main reasons things in IT are slow isn't because tickets take a long time to complete, but that they spend a long time waiting in a queue. The busier a resource is, the longer the queue gets, eventually leading to ~2% of the ticket's time spent with somebody doing actual work on it. The rest is just the ticket waiting for somebody to get through the backlog, do their part and then push the rest into somebody else's backlog, which is just as long.

I'm surprised FAANGs don't have that part figured out yet.

[embedding-shape]

To be fair, the alternative is them having to maintain and continuously check N services that various devs deployed because it felt appropriate in the moment, and then there is a 50/50 chance the service will just sit there unused and introduce new vulnerability vectors.

I do know the feeling you're talking about though, and probably a better balance is somewhere in the middle. Just wanted to add that the solution probably isn't "Let devs deploy their own services without review", just as the solution probably also isn't "Stop devs for 6 months to deploy services they need".

[pvtmert]

From my experience, it depends on how you frame your "service" to the reviewers. Obviously 2023 was the very early stage of LLMs, where the security aspects were quite murky at best. They (reviewers) probably did not had any runbook or review criteria at that time.

If you had advertised this as a "regular service which happens to use LLM for some specific functions" and the "output is rigorously validated and logged", I am pretty sure you would get a green-light.

This is because their concern is data-privacy and security. Not because they care or the company actually cares, but because fines of non-compliance are quite high and have greater visibility if things go wrong.

[pvtmert]

I am also ex-FAANG (recently departed), while I partially agree the "policy-people" pop-up fairly often, my experience is more on the inadequate checks side.

Though with the recent layoffs and stuff, the security in Amazon was getting better. Even the best-practices for IAM policies that was the norm in 2018, is just getting enforced by 2025.

Since I had a background of infosec, it always confused me how normal it was to give/grant overly permissive policies to basically anything. Even opening ports to worldwide (0.0.0.0/0) had just been a significant issue in 2024, still, you can easily get away with by the time the scanner finds your host/policy/configuration...

Although nearly all AWS accounts managed by Conduit (internal AWS Account Creation and Management Service), the "magic-team" had many "account-containers" to make all these child/service accounts joining into a parent "organization-account". By the time I left, the "organization-account" had no restrictive policies set, it is up to the developers to secure their resources. (like S3 buckets & their policies)

So, I don't think the policy folks are overall wrong. In the best case scenario, they do not need to exist in the first place! As the enforcement should be done to ensure security. But that always has an exception somewhere in someone's workflow.

[throwaway_z0om]

Defense in depth is important, while there is a front door of approvals, you need stuff checking the back door to see if someone left the keys under the mat.

[weinzierl]

I think there are two different things at work here that deserve to be separated:

1. The compliance box tickers and bean counters are in the way of innovation and it hurts companies.

2. Claws derive their usefulness mainly from having broad permissions, not only to you local system but also to your accounts via your real identity [1]. Carefulness is very much warranted.

[1] People correct me if I'm misguided, but that is how I see it. Run the bot in a sandbox with no data and a bunch of fake accounts and you'll see how useful that is.

[enderforth]

It's been my experience that there are 2 types of security people. 1. Are the security people who got into a security because it was one of the only places that let them work with every part of the stack, and exposure to dozens of different domains on the regular, and the idea of spending hours understanding and then figuring out ways around whitelist validations are appealing

2. Those that don't have much technical chops, but can get by with a surface level understanding of several areas and then perform "security shamanism" to intimidate others and pull out lots of jargon. They sound authoritative because information security is a fairly esoteric concept and because you can't argue against security like you can't argue against health and safety, the only response is "so you don't care about security?!"

It is my experience that the first are likely to work with you to help figure out how to get your application past the hurdles and challenges you face viewing it as an exciting problem. The second view their job as to "protect the organization" not deliver value. They love playing dressup in security theater and their depth of their understanding doesn't even pose a drowning risk to infants, which they make up for with esoterica, and jargon. They are also unfortunately the one's cooking up "standards" and "security policies" because it allows them to feel like they are doing real work, without the burden of actually knowing what they are doing, and talented people are actually doing something.

Here's a good litmus test to distinguish them, ask their opinion on the CISSP. If it's positive they probably don't know what the heck they are talking about.

Source: A long career operating in multiple domains, quite a few of which have been in security having interacted with both types (and hoping I fall into the first camp rather than the latter)

[beaker52]

The difference is that _you_ wiped your own hard drive. Even if prompt injection arrives by a scraped webpage, you still pressed the button.

All these claws throw caution to the wind in enabling the LLM to be triggered by text coming from external sources, which is another step in wrecklessness.

[franze]

my time at a money startup (debit cards) i pushed to legal and security people to change their behaviour from "how can we prevent this" to "how can we enable this - while still staying with the legal and security framework" worked good after months of hard work and day long meetings.

then the heads changed and we were back to square one.

but for a moment it was glorious of what was possible.

[fragmede]

It's a cultural thing. I loved working at Google because the ethos was "you can do that, and i'll even help you, but have you considered $reason why your idea is stupid/isn't going to work?"

[doodaddy]

These comments kill me. It sounds a lot like the “job creators” argument. If only these pesky regulations would go away I could create jobs and everyone would be rich. It’s a bogus argument either way.

Now for the more reasonable point: instead of being adversarial and disparaging those trying to do their job why not realize that, just like you, they have a certain viewpoint and are trying to do the best they can. There is no simple answer to the issues we’re dealing with and it will require compromise. That won’t happen if you see policy and security folks as “climbing out of their holes”.

[throwaway27448]

> every time you try something innovative the "policy people" will climb out of their holes and put random roadblocks in your way, not for the sake of actual security (that would be fine but would require actual engagement) but just to feel important

The only innovation I want to see coming out of this powerblock is how to dismantle it. Their potential to benefit humanity sailed many, many years ago.

[imiric]

> I work at a FAANG and every time you try something innovative the "policy people" will climb out of their holes and put random roadblocks in your way

What a surprise that someone working in Big Tech would find "pesky" policies to get in their way. These companies have obviously done so much good for the world; imagine what they could do without any guardrails!

[0x3f]

Work expands to fill the allocated resources in literally everything. This same effect can be seen in software engineering complexity more generally, but also government regulators, etc. No department ever downsizes its own influence or budget.

[jihadjihad]

No laws when you’re running Claws.

[Betelbuddy]

"I have given root access to my machine to the whole Internet, but these security peasants come with the pitchforks for me..."

[aaronrobinson]

It’s not to feel important, it’s to make others feel they’re important. This is the definition of corporate.