nullclaw

Security Improvement Roadmap

Current State: Strong Foundation

nullclaw has excellent application-layer and OS-level security:

• Command allowlist (not blocklist)
• Path traversal protection
• Command injection blocking ($(...), backticks, &&, >)
• Secret isolation (API keys not leaked to shell)
• Rate limiting (configurable actions/hour)
• Channel authorization (empty = deny all, * = allow all)
• Risk classification (Low/Medium/High)
• Environment variable sanitization
• Forbidden paths blocking
• OS-level sandboxing (Landlock, Firejail, Bubblewrap, Docker)
• Resource limits (memory, CPU, disk)
• Audit logging with HMAC signatures
• Encrypted secrets (ChaCha20-Poly1305)
• 1,639 tests

Comparison Matrix

Feature	PicoClaw	ZeroClaw	nullclaw
Binary Size	~8 MB	3.4 MB	639 KB
RAM Usage	< 10 MB	< 5 MB	~1 MB
Startup Time	< 1 s	< 10 ms	< 2 ms
Command Allowlist	Unknown	Yes	Yes
Path Blocking	Unknown	Yes	Yes
Injection Protection	Unknown	Yes	Yes
OS Sandbox	No	No	Yes (4 backends)
Resource Limits	No	No	Yes
Audit Logging	No	No	Yes (HMAC-signed)
Encrypted Secrets	No	No	Yes (ChaCha20)
Tests	—	1,017	1,639

Roadmap

Phase 1: Hardening (Near-Term)

Task	Status	Impact
seccomp syscall filtering (Linux)	Planned	High
Certificate pinning for channels	Planned	Medium
Signed config verification	Planned	Medium
SIEM-compatible audit export	Planned	Medium
Security self-test (nullclaw audit --check)	Planned	Low

Phase 2: Enterprise Features (Future)

Task	Status	Impact
mTLS for gateway	Planned	High
RBAC (role-based access control)	Planned	High
Multi-tenant isolation	Planned	Medium
Compliance reporting	Planned	Medium

Security Is Agnostic

All security features are implemented as vtable interfaces — swappable like providers and channels:

// Swap security backends via config
{
  "security": {
    "sandbox": { "backend": "auto" }     // or "landlock", "firejail", etc.
  }
}

Security features add negligible overhead:

Feature	Binary Impact	RAM Overhead
Sandbox detection	~5 KB	~10 KB
Resource monitoring	~3 KB	~5 KB
Audit logging	~4 KB	~20 KB (buffered)
Total	~12 KB	~35 KB

Even with full security, nullclaw uses <0.5% of RAM on $5 hardware.

CLI Preview

# Security status
nullclaw doctor
# → Sandbox: Landlock active
# → Audit logging: enabled (42 events today)
# → Resource limits: 512 MB mem, 80% CPU

# Audit queries
nullclaw audit --user @alice --since 24h
nullclaw audit --risk high --violations-only
nullclaw audit --verify-signatures