Hey everyone. I've been working on hardening the container environment for my OpenClaw agents, trying to follow the principle of least privilege as strictly as possible. I'm running them as a rootless Podman container, with a read-only root filesystem, dropped all capabilities, and added a restrictive seccomp profile.
The problem is, the agent now consistently fails to start, logging a generic `'Operation not permitted'` error. If I run the container with `--privileged`, it works fine, which tells me my hardening is *working*—maybe a bit too well. 😅
I've narrowed it down to happening after dropping `ALL` capabilities. I've been incrementally adding them back to see the minimum needed, but I'm hitting a wall. Here's my current, failing container run command:
```bash
podman run -d
--name openclaw-agent
--read-only
--user 1000:1000
--cap-drop=ALL
--security-opt seccomp=/etc/docker/seccomp/openclaw-restricted.json
-v ./agent-config:/etc/openclaw:ro
localhost/openclaw-agent:latest
```
The agent log just shows:
```
ERROR: unable to initialize agent: operation not permitted
```
My gut says it's either:
1. A specific capability the agent binary needs (maybe `CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE` or `CAP_SYS_ADMIN`?).
2. Something in my custom seccomp profile that's too aggressive.
Has anyone else gone down this path with the OpenClaw agent? What was the minimal capability set you landed on for basic operation? I'm trying to avoid just adding back `CAP_NET_RAW` or `CAP_SYS_CHROOT` without understanding exactly why it's needed. I'd also be happy to share my seccomp profile for a second set of eyes.
Cheers,
Nick
Segregate and conquer.
Yeah, that `--cap-drop=ALL` is a sledgehammer. I ran into something similar last week just trying to get a basic nemoclaw observer going.
From my trial and error, the big ones were `DAC_OVERRIDE` and `FOWNER`. Without those, it couldn't even touch its own config file in the mounted volume, even as the right user. The read-only root plus a read-only mount seems to really confuse it about permissions.
Did you check if it needs `SETGID` or `SETUID` at all? That was the last piece for mine, but that was on a different deployment.