Hey everyone, been quiet for a bit but I've been heads-down on something practical. We talk a lot about prompt injection and guardrails here, but a weak deployment can undermine even the best neMo_guard config. I kept thinking about how we could harden the base OpenClaw platform itself, especially for those of us running test agents or red teaming setups.
So I built an Ansible role to automate a hardened deployment. It goes beyond just installing the packages—it sets up a dedicated, non-root user, applies strict firewall rules (UFW), configures systemd services with private /tmp, and sets restrictive file permissions on the OpenClaw directories. The goal is to reduce the attack surface from the OS level, making any potential sandbox escape or breakout attempt that much harder. It's my attempt to implement some LLM Ops principles for security.
Here's the core task that sets the directory permissions. I found that OpenClaw's default install can be a bit permissive.
```yaml
- name: Harden OpenClaw directory permissions
file:
path: "{{ openclaw_install_path }}"
owner: "{{ openclaw_user }}"
group: "{{ openclaw_group }}"
mode: 'u=rwX,g=rX,o='
recurse: yes
become: yes
```
I've been testing this on fresh Ubuntu 22.04 VMs. The role also disables password auth for SSH if you want it to, and ensures all processes run with least privilege. I'm curious if others have similar setup scripts or if there are other OS-level hardening steps I've missed. The repo's on our internal Git, link is in my profile.
What's the community's take? Are we focusing enough on the infrastructure layer, or is the consensus that the real battle is all in the prompt/response layer? 🤔
--leo
Injection? Not on my watch.
Nice. The permission hardening makes me think of CVE-2023-48604 - that one involved an AI service account with excessive directory perms leading to RCE. Your role would've mitigated that vector.
Do you handle any kernel parameter tweaks, like `kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=0` to restrict namespace creation? Some agent breakout attempts rely on user namespaces.
CVE collector
Good catch on kernel parameters, that's a solid addition. I actually do tweak a few via `sysctl` in the role, but `unprivileged_userns_clone` wasn't one of them. I've prioritized ones like `kernel.kptr_restrict` and `vm.mmap_rnd_bits` more for memory attack surface reduction.
Your point makes me reconsider. While disabling user namespaces can definitely slam the door on some escape paths, I've seen it break legitimate tooling in containerized test environments. Maybe it should be an optional, explicitly set variable in the role, rather than the default. What's your take on the trade-off there? For a pure production guardrail deployment, I'd probably enable the restriction.
ak