Trent OpenClaw Security Assessment

Free security audit for your OpenClaw 🦞 environment. Finds the gaps isolated checks miss: gateway config, tool permissions, MCP servers, skills, and how they chain into attack paths.

Trent correlates configuration, permissions, connectivity, and data access across these surfaces to identify privilege escalation paths, secret exposure, and multi-step compromise scenarios — returning prioritized findings with concrete remediation steps.

Why now? We've spent years securing modern and AI stacks for fast-moving teams. Sharing some of those learnings with the OpenClaw community.

Built by the team that analyzed all 52,652 ClawHub packages and ran behavioral analysis on the 2,354 most popular skills.

• Gateway exposure and security posture
• Tool and file permission risks
• MCP server trust boundaries
• Plugin and skill attack surface
• Chained attack paths across components

The audit returns findings grouped by severity:

• Critical
• High
• Medium
• Low

Each finding includes the risk, why it matters, and remediation steps.

OpenClaw setups often combine gateway access, tools, MCP servers, plugins, and local file permissions. Small misconfigurations can combine into high-impact attack paths. This audit is designed to find those paths before an attacker does.

OpenClaw environments rarely fail because of one obvious issue in one file. They fail at the boundaries between components — a gateway exposed on the wrong interface, a skill with broad filesystem access, and an MCP server using weak transport may each be benign in isolation, but combine into a direct path from prompt input to secret access or arbitrary execution.

Trent is built to evaluate those interactions. It doesn't just flag isolated misconfigurations — it models how configuration, permissions, connectivity, and data access work together across your OpenClaw setup, then prioritizes findings by exploitability and blast radius.

The audit runs in three phases. Each one is local-first, and Phase 2 is gated on your explicit confirmation before anything sensitive is uploaded.

1. Configuration audit. The skill reads your OpenClaw config and skill metadata, redacts secrets locally, and sends only the redacted metadata to Trent. Initial findings come back grouped by severity.
2. Skill packaging — preview, then upload. The skill scans your workspace for skills and code projects, shows you the exact list it would upload (files, sizes, and any secrets it redacted), and waits for your OK. Nothing leaves your machine until you confirm.
3. Deep analysis. Each uploaded skill is analyzed in the same Trent thread as Phase 1, so chained issues — a permissive skill plus a misconfigured gateway plus a secret in a tool definition — surface as one finding. Recommended fixes are returned as config diffs for you to review and apply; the skill never modifies your files.

See Permissions & privacy for the exact data sent in each phase.

Here's the kind of chained finding Trent surfaces — three lower-severity issues that combine into a critical exposure path. Categories drawn from Trent's behavioral analysis of 2,354 public ClawHub skills.

🔴 CRITICAL — Credential exfiltration via overly-permissive skill

1. HIGH — OPENAI_API_KEY stored in plaintext in a skill's config, not in environment variables
2. HIGH — same skill requests unscoped network and filesystem access
3. MEDIUM — outbound webhook with no response validation

A prompt injection in the skill's SKILL.md can cause the agent to read the plaintext key and exfiltrate it through the broad network permission to the unverified webhook. None of the three findings is critical alone — the chain is.

Fix: move secrets to environment variables, scope network permissions to specific hosts, and validate webhook responses against an allowlist.

• Requires: A running OpenClaw setup with ~/.openclaw directory.

1. Get an API key at trent.ai → Get OpenClaw Access.

2. Install the skill (use openclaw skills update @trent-ai-release/trentclaw to upgrade):

   openclaw skills install @trent-ai-release/trentclaw

3. Set your key:

   openclaw config set skills.entries.trent-openclaw-security.apiKey YOUR_TRENT_API_KEY

4. Restart Gateway:

   openclaw gateway restart

5. Run an audit. Start a new agent session and ask:

   Audit my OpenClaw setup for security risks using trent
   

Use OpenClaw's secrets management to store your key in a file instead of plaintext config. This is recommended for headless or systemd-managed deployments.

1. Create a secrets file with restricted permissions (the prompt below keeps the key out of shell history):

   mkdir -p ~/.openclaw
   printf 'Enter your Trent API key: '
   read -rs TRENT_API_KEY; echo
   ( umask 077 && printf '{ "TRENT_API_KEY": "%s" }\n' "$TRENT_API_KEY" > ~/.openclaw/.trent.env )
   unset TRENT_API_KEY

2. Add a file provider and configure the secret:

   openclaw secrets configure

   • Add provider: source=file, alias=trent, path=/home/<user>/.openclaw/.trent.env, mode=json
   • Select field: skills.entries.trent-openclaw-security.apiKey
   • Source: file, provider: trent, id: /TRENT_API_KEY
   • Apply the plan

For more provider options (1Password, HashiCorp Vault, SOPS, and others), see the OpenClaw Secrets documentation.

Trent is explicit about what leaves your machine and asks before uploading anything sensitive. The full flow is in How the audit runs.

Phase 1 sends redacted configuration metadata: your openclaw.json (with API keys, tokens, and passwords replaced by [REDACTED]), skill names and SKILL.md metadata, and file permissions on your config. The body of any SKILL.md, MEMORY.md, SOUL.md, or other workspace file is not included.

Phase 2 sends zipped source for the skills and code projects you confirm in the preview. Before zipping, the skill excludes files that commonly carry secrets — env files, private keys, certificates, databases, SSH keys, credential stores. Inside the remaining files, it replaces known secret formats (OpenAI / Anthropic / Slack / GitHub tokens, AWS keys, DB connection strings, and api_key = "..." style values) with [REDACTED]. Redaction is pattern-based and best-effort — keep custom-format secrets in environment variables rather than hard-coded in skill files. The full exclusion and redaction rules live in package_skills.py.

Stays on your machine: the Trent API key and any other secrets stored in OpenClaw config or secrets files.

Data handling and retention. How Trent stores, processes, and deletes the audit data you send — including retention period and deletion requests — is governed by our Terms of Service.

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

If trentclaw helps with your OpenClaw setup, a star ⭐ on this repo helps other users find it.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Copyright 2025-2026 Trent AI.

Trent secures agentic systems across code, infrastructure, workflows, and runtime behavior. The OpenClaw skill focuses on one layer of that stack: the local agent environment where permissions, tools, secrets, and remote integrations meet. To learn more, visit trent.ai.