Hey folks, hoping to get some advice from the hive mind. So, I finally finished migrating my team's agent runtime from a big proprietary vendor to OpenClaw, self-hosted on our own infra. The technical win feels great — we own the data flow, the logs, everything. 🎉
But now I'm facing the "fun" part: security compliance. Our old vendor had all the shiny third-party audit reports (SOC 2, pen test summaries) we could just hand to our clients. Now that we're the vendor, *we* have to provide that assurance. I've got a pile of security questionnaires from our enterprise clients, and I need to find auditors and pentesters myself.
I'm looking for recommendations, but also war stories. What should I be looking for in a firm that gets self-hosted, containerized environments like ours? I'm worried about getting a templated report that doesn't reflect our actual architecture (think: Tailscale mesh, Docker Compose stacks, air-gapped backups).
Some specific points I'm pondering:
* **Pentesting Cadence:** Annual feels standard, but is that enough when we're pushing our own updates monthly? Do you supplement with continuous vulnerability scanning (like Trivy/Grype in the pipeline)?
* **Report "Translation":** How do you handle questions about *their* incident response playbook when you're self-hosted? I'm writing a lot of "This is our responsibility, here is our documented process" instead of pointing to a vendor doc.
* **Finding the Right Auditor:** Should I prioritize smaller firms that might understand our stack better over the big names that procurement loves?
Any providers you've had good (or terrible) experiences with? Pitfalls to avoid when commissioning these reports? The goal is to be transparent and secure, not just check a box.
~ Raj
Selfhosted since 2004
Ah, the compliance hangover after the technical victory. Classic.
> I'm worried about getting a templated report that doesn't reflect our actual architecture
That's the default. Most of the big-brand audit shops have a checkbox mentality. You'll get a SOC 2 that rubber-stamps your policies, but the pentest team they subcontract to won't know a Tailscale mesh from a fishing net. You need to ask potential firms for a sample "methods" section from a past container/network assessment. If it's generic OWASP Top 10 fluff, move on.
On cadence: annual is for checking a compliance box. It's useless for actual security if you're pushing monthly. You're right to think about pipeline scanning (Trivy/Grype), but that's just CVEs. You need something for logic and config flaws. A lighter, focused pentest on net-new components every quarter, paired with your automated scanning, is less theater and more useful. But good luck explaining that to procurement.
Ah, the pentesting cadence question is a good one. Annual is just for the checkbox on the sales deck. If you're pushing monthly updates, you need something in the pipeline.
We added a lightweight, automated step in CI that runs a security unit test suite. It uses a local LLM (via our own OpenClaw agent, funnily enough) to sanity-check config changes and new function calls for logic flaws that a CVE scanner would miss. It's not a replacement for a human, but it catches a lot of the "oops, I exposed an internal tool" stuff.
For the annual one, you could try timing it just after a major release, so at least the report reflects your most significant architecture of the year. Still feels a bit like a snapshot, though.
-- lena
Annual pentests are a compliance artifact, not a security posture. They're a snapshot of a system that changes.
You're right to question it. The real risk is in the agent logic and prompt injection surface, which most network-focused firms won't even touch. You need a firm that specializes in LLM/agent security or has a dedicated adversarial simulation team for it.
Continuous scanning for CVEs is basic hygiene. It doesn't cover the novel attack vectors your OpenClaw setup introduces. Look for testers who will ask for your agent schemas, function definitions, and try to pivot from a compromised agent into your backend systems. If they don't know what nemoclaw is, keep looking.
Assume breach. Then prove you can respond.