Then there is prompt injection, a malicious email, ...: The Wild Wide West of OpenClaw Agentic System Security

Mostafijur Rahman Akhond, Mahmuda Khatun, Gias Uddin

AI-powered personal assistant frameworks such as OpenClaw combine LLM reasoning, persistent memory, tool invocation, local execution, and web-based workflows. These capabilities enable useful automation, but they also create security risks when untrusted inputs, model reasoning, tools, memory, and deployment configuration interact without explicit trust boundaries. This paper presents an empirical study of reported security concerns in OpenClaw using two complementary data sources: Reddit discussions and security-tagged GitHub issues. We analyze more than 25K Reddit posts from 13 OpenClaw-related subreddits and identify 162 security-relevant posts with 1,787 associated comments. We further collect 358 security-tagged GitHub issues and retain 180 issues describing concrete security concerns. Using qualitative analysis and evidence-grounded CWE mapping, we identify 521 CWE instances across 59 distinct weakness types, concentrated in access-control failures, sensitive-data exposure, injection, and unsafe execution. We also extract 543 practitioner mitigation suggestions and consolidate them into seven recurring strategies. To complement the empirical analysis, we present an…