Compliance Impact

The vulnerability allows attackers to make persistent malicious configuration changes that affect command execution, network behavior, credentials, and operator policies. Such unauthorized modifications can lead to breaches of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive data and system controls.

Because these impacts include unauthorized access and potential compromise of credentials and network behavior, the vulnerability could negatively affect compliance with standards and regulations like GDPR and HIPAA, which require strict controls over data protection, access management, and system integrity.

However, the provided information does not explicitly mention compliance with any specific standards or regulations.

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Executive Summary

CVE-2026-45006 is an improper access control vulnerability in OpenClaw versions before 2026.4.23. It affects the gateway tool's config.apply and config.patch operations, where a flawed denylist meant to protect sensitive configuration paths can be bypassed by attackers with compromised models.

This allows attackers to write unsafe configuration changes that persist even after system restarts. These changes can affect critical areas such as command execution, network and proxy behavior, credentials forwarding, telemetry, hook endpoints, memory and indexing surfaces, and operator policy controls.

The root cause is a missing or incomplete authorization mechanism (CWE-862), where the denylist protection was insufficient due to the config schema outgrowing it.

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Impact Analysis

This vulnerability can have serious impacts including unauthorized command execution, manipulation of network and proxy settings, exposure or misuse of credentials, and alteration of operator policies.

Because the malicious configuration changes persist after restarts, attackers can maintain long-term control or influence over the affected system.

The vulnerability affects confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the system, potentially leading to data breaches, service disruptions, or unauthorized access.

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Mitigation Strategies

To mitigate this vulnerability, you should update OpenClaw to version 2026.4.23 or later, which includes a fix that replaces the incomplete denylist with a fail-closed allowlist for the gateway config.apply and config.patch operations.

This update restricts configuration changes to only agent-tunable prompt/model settings and mention-gating paths, rejecting all other unsafe config mutations before they are applied.

Applying this patch will prevent attackers from exploiting the improper access control vulnerability that allows malicious config modifications to persist and affect command execution, network behavior, credentials, and operator policies.

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