OpenClaw Deployment Hardening

Use this skill to add repeatable security gates around OpenClaw build and deployment workflows.

Enforce a Secure Build Pipeline

Add mandatory controls to CI before artifacts are promoted:

• Dependency and lockfile vulnerability scan (fail on critical CVEs).

• Image scan for OS/package vulnerabilities.

• Secret scanning across source and build context.

• SBOM generation and artifact signing.

• Policy check that blocks deploy when controls fail.

Example CI step order:

Build

npm ci npm run build

Security gates

trivy fs . trivy image my-registry/openclaw:${GIT_SHA} syft my-registry/openclaw:${GIT_SHA} -o spdx-json > sbom.json cosign sign --key cosign.key my-registry/openclaw:${GIT_SHA}

Lock Down Container Runtime

Run OpenClaw with restrictive defaults:

• Non-root user in container

• Read-only root filesystem where possible

• Drop all Linux capabilities, add back only required

• no-new-privileges enabled

• Constrained CPU/memory limits to reduce abuse impact

• Seccomp/AppArmor (or equivalent) profile enforced

Kubernetes-oriented expectations:

• runAsNonRoot: true

• allowPrivilegeEscalation: false

• readOnlyRootFilesystem: true

• network policy deny-all baseline with explicit allow rules

Gate Production Promotion

Require explicit promotion checks:

• Security sign-off on CVE exceptions.

• Signed artifact verification in deployment stage.

• Drift check between expected and live manifest values.

• Deployment only from immutable tags or digests.

Avoid mutable latest tags for production OpenClaw services.

Protect Data and Session Surfaces

• Minimize prompt/response retention by policy.

• Mask secrets and PII in logs before shipping to SIEM.

• Encrypt persistent volumes and backups.

• Isolate tenant/session data boundaries when serving multiple teams.

Post-Deploy Verification

Run a hardening smoke test immediately after rollout:

kubectl get pods -n openclaw kubectl auth can-i --as=system:serviceaccount:openclaw:default list secrets -n openclaw kubectl get networkpolicy -n openclaw kubectl logs deploy/openclaw -n openclaw --tail=200

Verify:

• Pod security context matches policy.

• Service account permissions are least privilege.

• Ingress auth/rate limits are effective.

• No plaintext secrets appear in logs.

Incident-Ready Rollback Pattern

Maintain a hardened rollback workflow:

• Freeze further rollouts.

• Revoke suspect tokens and rotate secrets.

• Roll back to last signed known-good image digest.

• Re-run post-deploy hardening verification.

• Capture timeline and artifacts for forensics.

Related Skills

• container-hardening - Container security baseline controls

• kubernetes-hardening - Pod and cluster hardening patterns

• sbom-supply-chain - SBOM, signing, and provenance controls