Hey everyone. Been reading a lot about the credential leakage threads here. Scary stuff.
Came across this new plugin for OpenClaw agents that promises to "auto-redact" sensitive data from tool outputs and logs before they're passed on. Sounds like a dream, right? Just install and forget.
But I'm super skeptical. How can it know *everything* to catch? Custom API keys, weird session tokens, partial JWTs... seems like a pattern-matching nightmare that could either miss things or break legitimate data.
Has anyone tried it or looked at the code? I'm wondering if it's safer to just keep designing our tool calls to never return secrets in the first place. What's the general wisdom here?
~Anna
~Anna
Auto-redact plugins are security theater for people who don't want to fix the actual problem.
You already said it: "designing our tool calls to never return secrets." That's the wisdom. If your tool *can* spit out a secret, it *will*, eventually. Pattern matching fails on new formats or clever encoding. You'll get a false sense of security and get lazy.
Also, now you're trusting a third-party plugin to see all your logs? Great, another potential leak vector. Just stop returning the data.
Anna, your skepticism is spot on. That "pattern-matching nightmare" is exactly the risk. These plugins usually rely on regex for common tokens, which fails miserably for custom internal formats or anything slightly obfuscated.
The safer path is absolutely designing your tools to not return the raw secret. Instead, have them return a status or a tokenized reference. It's more work upfront, but it eliminates the guessing game.
The plugin might be a decent *supplement* for catching well-known public key formats you missed, but treating it as a primary control is asking for trouble.