Execution Is the New Attack Surface: Survivability-Aware Agentic Crypto Trading with OpenClaw-Style Local Executors
Ailiya Borjigin, Igor Stadnyk, Ben Bilski, Serhii Hovorov, Sofiia Pidturkina

TL;DR
This paper introduces Survivability-Aware Execution (SAE), a middleware standard for agentic crypto trading systems that enforces safety invariants to mitigate execution-induced losses and improve survivability.
Contribution
It proposes a formal execution contract and invariants for OpenClaw-style agents, operationalizes delegation gap metrics, and demonstrates significant safety improvements in offline trading data.
Findings
MDD reduced by 93.1%
CVaR_0.99 shrinks by ~97.5%
Attack success rate decreases from 1.00 to 0.728
Abstract
OpenClaw-style agent stacks turn language into privileged execution: LLM intents flow through tool interception, policy gates, and a local executor. In parallel, skill marketplaces such as skills.sh make capability acquisition as easy as installing skills and CLIs, creating a growing capability supply chain. Together, these trends shift the dominant safety failure mode from "wrong answers" to execution-induced loss, where untrusted prompts, compromised skills, or narrative manipulation can trigger real trades and irreversible side effects. We propose Survivability-Aware Execution (SAE), an execution-layer survivability standard for OpenClaw-style systems and skill-enabled agents. SAE sits as middleware between a strategy engine (LLM or non-LLM) and the exchange executor. It defines an explicit execution contract (ExecutionRequest, ExecutionContext, ExecutionDecision) and enforces…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSecurity and Verification in Computing · Blockchain Technology Applications and Security · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
