Hey folks! 👋 Been lurking here for a while, but this subforum finally got me to post. I've been neck-deep in integrating a few different agent runtimes into my homelab setup—messing with OpenClaw's architecture, tinkering with NemoClaw's plugin system, and trying to get everything to play nice with my Home Assistant and Grafana stacks. It's a blast, but every time I look at adopting a new vendor or runtime for a more serious project, I hit the same wall: the security questionnaire.
I mean, I'm just a hobbyist who likes to mod things for fun and (hopefully) better security, but these questionnaires feel like they're written in another language. They ask about "threat modeling," "penetration testing cadence," and "incident response playbooks," and half the time the answers I get back are either super evasive or read like marketing copy. I recently asked a vendor about their container isolation and got back a paragraph that basically said "Docker is secure" without any details on user namespaces, seccomp profiles, or network policies.
So, for those of us who aren't full-time infosec pros but are responsible for our own little deployments, how do we even get started? I want to ask the right questions without sounding like I'm just reading off a checklist. For example, in my own lab, I've been trying to lock things down. Here's a snippet of a Docker Compose override I use to harden one of my agent containers:
```yaml
services:
my_agent:
security_opt:
- no-new-privileges:true
- seccomp:security/seccomp-profile.json
cap_drop:
- ALL
networks:
- agent_isolated
read_only: true
```
But that's just my own tinkering. When I'm evaluating a vendor, I need to know *their* defaults and architecture.
* What are the absolute must-ask questions for an AI agent runtime? Is it all about the container image, or should we be digging into the model inference server, the plugin sandboxing, and the data flow?
* How do you interpret a vague answer? If they say "we follow best practices," what's the next follow-up?
* Has anyone built a shared, community-vetted list of questions tailored to these specific types of projects? The generic cloud security questionnaires miss so much of the nuance.
I'd love to hear how you all approach this, especially if you've been through it with OpenClaw or similar frameworks. Let's pool our experiences and maybe build something useful for the community.
--Mike
If it's not broken, break it for security.
You've hit the nail on the head. Those questionnaires aren't for you, and they're barely for security. They're a CYA ritual for procurement teams. "Docker is secure" is the giveaway; it's a magic incantation to check a box.
Your best move is to invert the process. Stop trying to answer their questions and start asking your own, based on your actual deployment. Forget their "penetration testing cadence." Figure out what the agent can actually do. Can it write files? Can it initiate network connections? What happens if you feed it a malicious tool description?
The goal isn't to pass their audit, it's to not get owned. Their questionnaire won't help you with that. Your own tinkering will.
> "Your best move is to invert the process."
Totally agree with this shift in mindset. It's the difference between trying to please a hypothetical auditor and actually understanding the risks in your own stack.
For example, that "malicious tool description" bit is huge. I've been looking at how different runtimes parse YAML for tool definitions - some are way too permissive and will just exec a shell command if you format it right. That's a much more concrete question than whether they have a "vulnerability disclosure policy."
You still need some structure though, or your tinkering just finds random bugs. I usually start with a simple threat model: what can this agent access, and what's the worst thing it could be tricked into doing? That's kept me out of trouble more than any compliance checklist.