Introduction

ClawScan is a composable security scanning harness for agent skills.

Run a suite of skill security scanners, pass the results to a judge harness, and compare against multiple skill security benchmarks.

Quick Start

Install ClawScan:

npm install -g @openclaw/clawscan

Command-backed scanners and judges run in ClawScan's Docker runtime by default, so keep Docker running for local scans.

Run NVIDIA SkillSpector and Cisco Skill Scanner against a local skills/ folder:

clawscan --scanner skillspector --scanner cisco

Scan a known malicious skill

This example scans Trail of Bits' csv-summarizer skill, which claims to summarize a CSV file but also prints every environment variable when run.

git clone https://github.com/trailofbits/overtly-malicious-skills.git /tmp/overtly-malicious-skills
cd /tmp/overtly-malicious-skills
git checkout 4ffbf9461ef0505f9ce76a0d3694a18ec33ea531
clawscan skills/csv-summarizer \
  --scanner skillspector \
  --scanner cisco \
  --output /tmp/clawscan-csv-summarizer.json

Sample findings:

targets: 1
scanner_completed: 2
scanner_failed: 0
scanner_skipped: 0
issues_found: 2
errors: 0
full_results: /tmp/clawscan-csv-summarizer.json

The results bundle keeps the top-level artifact plus per-scanner JSON reports.

{
  "schemaVersion": "clawscan-run-v1",
  "target": "skills/csv-summarizer",
  "scanners": {
    "cisco": {
      "status": "completed",
      "durationMs": 42,
      "outputPath": "clawscan-csv-summarizer/skills/csv-summarizer/cisco.json",
      "isSafe": true,
      "maxSeverity": "SAFE",
      "findingsCount": 0
    },
    "skillspector": {
      "status": "completed",
      "durationMs": 42,
      "outputPath": "clawscan-csv-summarizer/skills/csv-summarizer/skillspector.json",
      "severity": "MEDIUM",
      "score": 31,
      "recommendation": "CAUTION",
      "issues": [
        {
          "id": "LP3",
          "severity": "MEDIUM",
          "file": "SKILL.md"
        },
        {
          "id": "E2",
          "severity": "HIGH",
          "file": "scripts/summarize.py"
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Motivation

Agent-skill security is new and fast-moving, with researchers and companies exploring many promising scanners, datasets, and judge harnesses. In our ClawHub Security Signals paper, we found that combining multiple scanners with a configurable judge works better than relying on any single scanner.

ClawScan turns that approach into a repeatable CLI. It includes a built-in clawhub profile, a saved scanner-and-judge configuration that matches what ClawHub runs in production, so researchers can reproduce results, test improvements, and help improve detection against the weekly refreshed ClawHub security-signals dataset.

Commands