1-Click RCE to steal your Moltbot data and keys

(depthfirst.com)

56 points | by arwt 1 hour ago

9 comments

  • decodebytes 10 minutes ago
    I rushed out nono.sh (the opposite of yolo!) in response to this and its already negated a few gateway attacks.

    It uses kernel-level security primitives (Landlock on Linux, Seatbelt on macOS) to create sandboxes where unauthorized operations are structurally impossible. API keys are also stored in apples secure enclave (or the kernel keyring in linux) , and injected at run time and zeroized from memory after use. There is also some blocking of destructive actions (rm -rf ~/)

    its as simple to run as: nono run --profile openclaw -- openclaw gateway

    You can also use it to sandbox things like npm install:

    nono run --allow node_modules --allow-file package.json package.lock npm install pkg

    Its early in, there will be bugs! PR's welcome and all that!

    https://nano.sh

  • overgard 14 minutes ago
    I'm curious, outside of AI enthusiasts have people found value with using Clawdbot, and if so, what are they doing with it? From my perspective it seems like the people legitimately busy enough that they actually need an AI assistant are also people with enough responsibilities that they have to be very careful about letting something act on their behalf with minimal supervision. It seems like that sort of person could probably afford to hire an administrative assistant anyway (a trustworthy one), or if it's for work they probably already have one.

    On the other hand, the people most inclined to hand over access to everything to this bot also strike me as people without a lot to lose? I don't want to make an unfair characterization or anything, it just strikes me that handing over the keys to your entire life/identity is a lot more palatable if you don't have much to lose anyway?

    Am I missing something?

    • mh2266 1 minute ago
      The whole premise of this thing seems to be that it has access to your email, web browser, messaging, and so on. That's what makes it, in theory, useful.

      The prompt injection possibilities are incredibly obvious... the entire world has write access to your agent.

      ???????

    • lxgr 7 minutes ago
      There's some good discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46838946
    • jondwillis 9 minutes ago
      Does it matter? Let them cook and get burned if they want to.
  • ethin 7 minutes ago
    Things like this are why I don't use AI agents like moltbot/openclaw. Security is just out the window with these things. It's like the last 50 years never happened.
  • vulnwrecker5000 2 minutes ago
    what worries me here is that the entire personal AI agent product category is built on the premise of “connect me to all your data + give me execution.” At that point, the question isn’t “did they patch this RCE,” it’s more about what does a secure autonomous agent deployment even look like when its main feature is broad authority over all of someone's connected data?

    Is the only real answer sandboxing + zero trust + treating agents as hostile by default? Or is this category fundamentally incompatible with least privilege?

    yikes

  • mentalgear 17 minutes ago
    Moltbot is a security nightmare, especially it's premise (tap into all your data sources) and the rapid uptake by inexperienced users makes it especially attractive for criminal networks.
  • dotancohen 28 minutes ago
    The real problem is that there is nothing novel here. Variants of this type of attack were clear from the beginning.
    • lxgr 9 minutes ago
      What I would have expected is prompt injection or other methods to get the agent to do something its user doesn't want it to, not regular "classical" attacks.

      At least currently, I don't think we have good ways of preventing the former, but the latter should be possible to avoid.

      • ethin 2 minutes ago
        They are easy to avoid if you actually give a damn. Unfortunately, people who create these things don't, assuming they even know what even half of these attacks are in the first place. They just want to pump out something now now now and the mindset is "we'll figure out all the problems later, I want my cake now now now now!" Maximum velocity! Full throttle!

        It's just as bad as a lot of the vibe-coders I've seen. I literally saw this vibe-coder who created an app without even knowing what they wanted to create (as in, what it would do), and the AI they were using to vibe-code literally handwrote a PE parser to load DLLs instead of using LoadLibrary or delay loading. Which, really, is the natural consequence of giving someone access to software engineering tools when they don't know the first thing about it. Is that gatekeeping of a sort? Maybe, but I'd rather have that then "anyone can write software, and oh by the way this app reimplements wcslen in Rust because the vibe-coder had no idea what they were even doing".

  • bmit 12 minutes ago
    So many people are giving keys to the kingdom to this thing. What is happening with humanity?
    • lxgr 5 minutes ago
      Humanity is the same it's always been. Some people are just inherently curious despite the obvious dangers.

      Also, if you think about it, billions of people aren't running Moltbot at all.

  • nsm100 10 minutes ago
    Thank you for doing this. I'm shocked that more people aren't thinking about security with respect to AI.
    • lxgr 4 minutes ago
      This isn't even AI security, as far as I can tell: It looks like regular old computer security to me.
  • clawsyndicate 20 minutes ago
    legit issue for local installs but this is why we run the hosted platform in gVisor. even with the exploit you're trapped in a sandbox with no access to the host node. we treat every container as hostile by default.