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IronClaw: a Rust-based clawd that runs tools in isolated WASM sandboxes
- friendofmine 8mo agoHuh what's the benefit
- dawg91 8mo agoIt's a hardened, security-first implementation. WASM runtime specifically is for isolating tool sandboxes
- verdverm 8mo agoWASM has issues with certain languages, why WASM and not OCI?
- ForHackernews 8mo agoDocker is not a security boundary?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- verdverm 8mo agoThat's defined in context, security is a spectrum with tradeoffs OCI supports far more and has a much bigger ecosystem
- dawg91 8mo agoFun fact: it's being developed by one of the authors of "Attention is all you need"
- ramoz 8mo agoworth mentioning an additional credential/or-not, the creator of "the platform powering the agentic future" (blockchain) https://www.near.org/ https://www.near.org/
- whalesalad 8mo agovibe coded eh https://github.com/nearai/ironclaw?tab=readme-ov-file#architecture https://github.com/nearai/ironclaw?tab=readme-ov-file#archit...
- dawg91 8mo agoI think the guys who are developing this (Illia Polosoukhin of "Attention is all you need") and others knows enough to leverage their skills with AI vs. producing slop
- lenwood 8mo agoAwesome to see a project deal with prompt injection. Using a WASM is clever. How does this ensure that tools adhere to capability-based permissions without breaking the sandbox?
- frolvlad 8mo agoInstead of expecting the tools to adhere, they are enforced. For example, to make an HTTP call with a secret key, the tool must use the proxy service that will enforce that the secret key is only used for the specific domain, if that is allowed, then the proxy service will make the call, thus the secret never leaks outside of the service. However, this design is still under development as it creates quite a bit of challenges.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- jonny_eh 8mo ago> Using a WASM is clever Every time a project is shared that uses WASM.
- MarkMarine 8mo agoClearly this developer knows the trick of developing with ai: adding “… and make it secure” to all your prompts. /s
- wyck 8mo agoYou mean llia Polosukhin, who is recognized as an AI founder and co‑authored the landmark 2017 paper “Attention Is All You Need" while at Google Research? /s ?
- MarkMarine 8mo agoYeah I do, first it’s a joke but second have you used Ironclaw? It’s buggy vibecoded software. Bring your Claude code with you to get it working if you try it. So yeah, the Primegean joke about adding “but make it secure” to your prompts is true about this, even if Illia is a genius and I look up to his work.
- verdverm 8mo agoI suspect OCI wins the sandbox space in the enterprise and everything else will be for hobbyists and companies like vercel that have a very narrow view of how software should be run
- canadiantim 8mo agoReminds me of the LocalGPT that was posted recently too (but which hasnt been updated in 7 months), so nice to see a newer rust-based implementation!
- ra0x3 8mo agoWhat runtimes are supported? I don't think I saw that part mentioned in the README
- ramoz 8mo agoSandboxes will be left in 2026. We don't need to reinvent isolated environments; not even the main issue with OpenClaw - literally go deploy it in a VM on any cloud and you've achieved all same benefits. We need to know if the email being sent by an agent is supposed to be sent and if an agent is actually supposed to be making that transaction on my behalf. etc
- lucianmarin 8mo agoWe should be able to revert any action done by agents. Or present user a queue will all actions for approval.
- observationist 8mo agoInstrumental convergence and the law of unintended consequences are going to be huge in 2026. I am excited.
- ramoz 8mo agosame! sharing this link for my own philosphy around it, ignore the tool. https://cupcake.eqtylab.io/security-disclaimer/ https://cupcake.eqtylab.io/security-disclaimer/
- frolvlad 8mo agoWell, the challenge is to know if the action supposed to be executed BEFORE it is requested to be executed. If the email with my secrets is sent, it is too late to deal with the consequences. Sandboxes could provide that level of observability, HOWEVER, it is a hard lift. Yet, I don't have better ideas either. Do you?
- ramoz 8mo agoif you extend the definition of sandbox, then yea. Solutions no, for now continued cat/mouse with things like "good agents" in the mix (i.e. ai as a judge - of course just as exploitable through prompt injection), and deterministic policy where you can (e.g. OPA/rego). We should continue to enable better integrations with runtime - why i created the original feature request for hooks in claude code. Things like IFC or agent-as-a-judge can form some early useful solutions.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- kittbuilds 8mo ago[dead]
- skybrian 8mo agoInteresting approach. It requires a Near AI account. Supposedly that's a more private way to do inference, but at the same time they do offer Claude Opus 4.6 (among others), so I wonder what privacy guarantees they can actually offer and whether it depends on Anthropic?
- dawg91 8mo agoThey do verifiable inference on TEEs for the open source models. The anthropic ones I think they basically proxy for you (also via trusted TEE) so that it cant be tied to you. VPN for LLM inference so to speak.
- bangaladore 8mo agoAfaik Anthropic is not giving pretty much any provider model weights, so any inference of Opus is certainly not private. Either going through Anthropic or Bedrock, or Vertex. Of the three Bedrock is probably the best for trust, but still not private by any means.
- amluto 8mo agoI'm getting tired of these vibe-designed security things. I skimmed the "design". What is sandboxed from what? What is the threat model? What does it protect against, if anything? What does it fail to protect against? How does data get into a sandbox? How does it get out? It kind of sounds like the LLM built a large system that doesn't necessarily achieve any actual value.
- amelius 8mo agoYes, I'm also tired of this black-box-for-everything approach. It may work for some cases, you may cherry pick some examples, but at the end of the day it is just stupid, and you are just kicking the can down the road and faking a solution. I'm hoping to see fewer of these posts. Until there is actual provable merit.
- stcredzero 8mo agoWe have a different security model. SEKS — Secure Environment for Key Services We built a broker for the keys/secrets. We have a fork of nushell called seksh, which takes stand-ins for the actual auth, but which only reifies them inside the AST of the shell. This makes the keys inaccessible for the agent. In the end, the agent won't even have their Anthropic/OpenAI keys! The broker also acts as a proxy, and injects secrets or even does asymmetric key signing on behalf of the proxied agent. My agents are already running on our fork of OpenClaw, doing the work. They deprecated their Doppler ENV vars, and all their work is through the broker! All that said, we might just take a few ideas from IronClaw as well. I put up a Show HN, but no one noticed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005607 Website is here: https://seksbot.com/ https://seksbot.com/
- bsaul 8mo agolooking at the feature parity page, i realized how big openclaw ecosystem has become. It's completely crazy for such a young project to be able to interface with so many subsystems so fast. At this rate, it's going to be simply impossible to catchup in just a few months.
- dawg91 8mo agoIdk this seems to be gaining momentum and with devs being able to leverage their skillset via vibe coding anything seems possible really.
- jgarzik 8mo agoDoes it isolate keys away from bots?
- dawg91 8mo agoYes exactly, keys are only injected at host boundary
- llmslave 8mo agothe power of openclaw is theres no sand boxing
- dawg91 8mo agoOr you design the sandbox so smartly that is seamless...
- itissid 8mo agoWait. I don't understand the threat vector modelled here. Any agent or two isolated ones that the do Webfetch and code exec, even in separate sandboxes, is pretty much game over as far as defending against threat vectors goes. What am I missing here?
- ottah 8mo agoWell, if wasm process is limited on the syscalls it can make, the blast radius is limited. For example you can block network access, and disk access for tools that don't need those capabilities. That being said, this doesn't sound like they're really thinking through the risks. > Dynamic Tool Building - Describe what you need, and IronClaw builds it as a WASM tool If the agent can write it's own insecure plugins, and the wasm processes isn't properly isolated, you've really gained nothing.
- itissid 8mo agoeven if it is isolated, like no network or host access. Like say the malicious prompt created a wasm tool that patched your project code to leak information like adding a logger.warning. but LOG_LEVEL was set to error or whatever that prevented this from surfacing during testing or dev/beta. Again running on that was container that code does not reveal anything. But then another isolated wasm tool was responsible to build the binary and ship it to prod. Shotgunned all over prod logs are spotted by a log watcher within minutes of deploy. Whew... right? But you are already screwed.
- 928570490687298 8mo agoThese OpenAI frontends are the new JS frameworks. Not a week goes by without yet another tool to let some vectors install malware or write rants to open source maintainers. Can't wait for the bubble to pop.
- aussieguy1234 8mo agoI built myself a docker container for openclaw which has an X server inside with VNC access. Openclaw only has access to a single folder on my machine that is shared with the container. I'm currently using this for social media research via browser automation, running as a daily cron job. Given I have VNC access and the browser is not in headless mode I can solve captchas myself as the agent runs into them. Apart from a known issue with the openclaw browser which the agent itself was made aware of so it could work around it, this has been working well so far. I'm thinking of open sourcing this container at some point...
- hbarka 8mo agoDid anybody notice who the founder of near.ai is? So that’s where he is now.
- oxag3n 8mo agoThere will be so much fun and revenge if this level of tooling is widely adopted by 1000x engineers. I ate some pop-corn while reading naive src/safety/leak_detector.rs If agents are reading - add at least minimal encryption detection, I'm sure someone will use Caesar encryption, easy to decode.
- mentalgear 8mo agotired of these vibe-coded "agents" and vibe-coded security concepts that sound super confident but have no substance, real tests or security audits and just turn out as secure as swiss cheese.
- OutOfHere 8mo agoWhat is the nearai account needed for?