Cyber: Openclaw Flaws Enable Data Theft, Privilege Escalation, A... Four
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a set of four security flaws in OpenClaw that could be chained to achieve data theft, privilege escalation, and persistence. The vulnerabilities, collectively dubbed Claw Chain by Cyera, can permit an attacker to establish a foothold, expose sensitive data, and plant backdoors. A brief description of the flaws is below - Cyera said successful exploitation of CVE-2026-44112 could allow an attacker to tamper with configuration, plant backdoors, and establish persistent control over the compromised host, whereas CVE-2026-44113 could be weaponized to read system files, credentials, and internal artifacts. The root cause for CVE-2026-44118, per the cybersecurity company, stems from the fact that OpenClaw trusts a client-controlled ownership flag called senderIsOwner, which signals whether the caller is authorized for owner-only tools, without validating it against the authenticated session. "The MCP loopback runtime now issues separate owner and non-owner bearer tokens and derives senderIsOwner exclusively from which token authenticated the request," OpenClaw detailed the fixes in an advisory for the flaw. "The spoofable sender-owner header is no longer emitted or trusted." Following responsible disclosure, all four vulnerabilities have been addressed in OpenClaw version 2026.4.22. Security researcher Vladimir Tokarev has been credited with discovering and reporting the issues. Users are advised to update to the latest version to stay protected against potential threats. "By weaponizing the agent's own privileges, an adversary moves through data access, privilege escalation, and persistence -- using the agent as their hands inside the environment," Cyera said. "Each step looks like normal agent behavior to traditional controls, broadening blast radius and making detection significantly harder."
Source: The Hacker News