ClawKeeper: Comprehensive Safety Protection for OpenClaw Agents Through Skills, Plugins, and Watchers

TL;DR

ClawKeeper is a comprehensive, multi-layered security framework designed to protect OpenClaw autonomous agents from system-level threats by integrating skills, plugins, and watchers for real-time defense.

Contribution

This paper introduces ClawKeeper, the first holistic security framework for OpenClaw, combining skill, plugin, and watcher protections to address security gaps.

Findings

Effective in mitigating diverse security threats

Reduces risk of data leakage and privilege escalation

Supports real-time intervention and monitoring

Abstract

OpenClaw has rapidly established itself as a leading open-source autonomous agent runtime, offering powerful capabilities including tool integration, local file access, and shell command execution. However, these broad operational privileges introduce critical security vulnerabilities, transforming model errors into tangible system-level threats such as sensitive data leakage, privilege escalation, and malicious third-party skill execution. Existing security measures for the OpenClaw ecosystem remain highly fragmented, addressing only isolated stages of the agent lifecycle rather than providing holistic protection. To bridge this gap, we present ClawKeeper, a real-time security framework that integrates multi-dimensional protection mechanisms across three complementary architectural layers. (1) \textbf{Skill-based protection} operates at the instruction level, injecting structured security policies directly into the agent context to enforce environment-specific constraints and cross-platform boundaries. (2) \textbf{Plugin-based protection} serves as an internal runtime enforcer, providing configuration hardening, proactive threat detection, and continuous behavioral monitoring throughout the execution pipeline. (3) \textbf{Watcher-based protection} introduces a novel, decoupled system-level security middleware that continuously verifies agent state evolution. It enables real-time execution intervention without coupling to the agent's internal logic, supporting operations such as halting high-risk actions or enforcing human confirmation. We argue that this Watcher paradigm holds strong potential to serve as a foundational building block for securing next-generation autonomous agent systems. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of ClawKeeper across diverse threat scenarios. We release our code.