BD OpenClaw Bash Safety — Why Your Agent Is a Security Risk
Understand the attack surface created when an OpenClaw agent executes shell commands autonomously. Covers obfuscation, injection, encoding attacks, and why ClawHavoc compromised 341 skills. Free primer for the Bash Security Validator skill.
As a process D 39/100 · Unfinished process — weak spots: result and completion, when it triggers, inputs and preconditions
How to improve
- Your own cases (evals/evals.json, 4–6 real requests with expected answers): the full check would then run those instead of a model-drafted suite.
- A spec.yaml with trigger phrases and assertions — a behaviour contract for CI; `skilltest init` writes a template.
Guard findings · 1
✓ No critical or high findings
Medium and low: 1
✓ Guard found no suspicious behaviour. 1 matches are attack strings quoted in this security skill's own documentation.
Files scanned: 2. Evidence is masked. Grey chips explain why severity was lowered.
Against the Agent Skills spec
- warning
name-formatname should be kebab-case (lowercase letters, digits, hyphens) - note
frontmatter-keyunknown frontmatter key "slug"
Process rating: all ten parameters 39/100
- 0Result and completion. Does not say what the result is
- 0Inputs and preconditions. Does not say what the process needs to start
- 0Failures and branches. Linear process with no failure handling
- 0Progress reporting. Says nothing while it works
- 20When it triggers. No condition that starts the skill
- 30Running it twice. 2 mutating operations with no state check
- 40Consistency. Frontmatter name (OpenClaw Bash Safety — Why Your Agent Is a Security Risk) differs from the folder (free-bash-safety-primer)
- 60Tools and files. Uses tools (bash, web) that frontmatter does not declare
- 100Steps. 4 steps
- 100Execution cost. Instruction body is 1428 tokens
Everything here is measured from the skill text rather than judged by a model, so the numbers are checkable. A parameter weighs more when it is a more common reason for the process to stall.
Quality signals
- +5Description has no quoted example phrases that should trigger the skill
- +4Description does not say when NOT to use the skill (false activations)
- +3Output format is not stated: the model decides each time
- +4No input/output examples
- +1No license
- +2Single-language instructions
- +3Description length 240: enough signal without eating the budget
- +4Structure: 6 headings
- +3Step-by-step instructions: 4 items
Quality base 70; lint remarks subtract, signals add up to 100. Result: 74.