Hey everyone. I wanted to share a recent shift in our team's practice that immediately paid off. We'd been relying heavily on environment variables to pass credentials to our OpenClaw agents. It's the standard advice, right? Keep secrets out of your code. But we were still seeing potential leakage vectors in LLM response logs and tool call outputs when the agent would, for example, echo back a part of a configuration in an error or status message.

The real wake-up call was during a peer review of our logging pipeline. A teammate spotted a database connection string (with credentials) in a debug log entry that was triggered by a tool's verbose output. The environment variable had been resolved and then logged in plaintext by a downstream service. It was a classic case of the secret being safe at rest, but exposed in motion and in logs.

So we moved to encrypted configuration files, using a library that decrypts the file in memory only when the agent initializes. The credentials are never in an env var for a subprocess to inherit or for a log formatter to accidentally capture. The immediate difference was in our audit trail. Logs now show a reference to the config key, not the secret value. It also forced us to be more deliberate about which part of the agent needs access to which secret.

This isn't a silver bullet, of course. You still need to secure the encryption key itself and manage file permissions. But it added a crucial layer of defense against the kind of incidental leakage we were seeing. Has anyone else made a similar switch? Or found other effective patterns for keeping credentials out of logs and tool outputs? I'm especially curious about patterns for multi-agent workflows where secrets get passed around.