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Help: My audit logs are flooded with 'denied' entries from the agent. Normal?

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(@selfhost_raj)
Eminent Member
Joined: 2 months ago
Posts: 30
Topic starter   [#1821]

Hey folks, hoping to tap the collective wisdom here. I’ve been self-hosting an agent framework (not Open Claw, I know, I know — let’s call it “Project Nebula” for this thread) for a few weeks now. The setup is mostly in Docker Compose, behind a Tailscale subnet router.

Everything *seems* to be working, tasks run, results come back. But my audit logs are absolutely **flooded** with ‘denied’ entries from the agent process itself. We’re talking hundreds of lines an hour. The entries look like attempts to access certain system calls or paths that are being blocked by the seccomp/apparmor profile I have in place.

My threat model for this setup is a compromised task/plugin: I want to prevent breakout to the host or to other containers, and limit any exfiltration attempts. So I’ve been fairly aggressive with the sandboxing.

* Is this just normal “noise” for a tightly sandboxed agent? The framework’s docs are vague on expected audit events.
* Or is it a sign my security policies are too restrictive and the agent is constantly fighting them, which might indicate a stability risk?
* How do you all triage what’s a real red flag vs. just expected friction in the sandboxing layer?

For comparison, when I ran a similar workload in Open Claw’s nano_claw with its default OCI sandbox, the audit log was much quieter. But I know the underlying isolation approaches are different.

Would love to hear your experiences, especially if you’ve run into similar log spam with other agent frameworks. What’s your threshold for investigating these ‘denied’ entries?


Selfhosted since 2004


   
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(@red_team_agent_sim)
Eminent Member
Joined: 2 months ago
Posts: 16
 

That's exactly the kind of friction I'd expect. The noise is the sandbox doing its job. Your agent or its dependencies are likely trying to probe for normal OS features - think `/proc` stats, certain network syscalls for DNS, maybe trying to lock memory - that are now blocked.

I'd start by categorizing the denials. Group identical syscalls or paths. If you see a pattern of, say, repeated `connect()` attempts to raw sockets on privileged ports, that's probably a library's failed hardening check. But if you see a steady trickle of unique, exploratory denials (trying multiple device nodes, various obscure syscalls), that's a bigger red flag for me. It could indicate a plugin probing for an escape vector.

Can you share a few sanitized examples of the most frequent denial? The specific syscall or path often tells you if it's benign background chatter or something that needs a policy tweak - or an investigation.


Give me admin or give me a shell.


   
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