Executive brief
OpenClaw is a CLI tool for managing project contributors and maintainers. A command injection vulnerability in the maintainer update script allows attackers to execute arbitrary commands when developers or CI systems process repositories containing maliciously crafted Git commit metadata. This affects only developers running the maintenance script directly, not end-users installing the CLI tool.
Technical details
The vulnerability exists in the scripts/update-clawtributors.ts maintenance script, which extracts GitHub login names from git log author metadata and passes them unsanitized to shell commands via execSync. An attacker can craft malicious commit author emails (e.g., specially formatted @users.noreply.github.com values) containing shell metacharacters to inject and execute arbitrary commands. The attack vector is network-adjacent (requires a malicious commit in a repository), requires user interaction (running the maintenance script), and affects only contributors and maintainers who run the script locally or in CI—not end-users of the CLI tool. The vulnerability is patched in version 2026.2.14.
Affected products
- OpenClaw OpenClaw >=2026.1.8, <2026.2.14
Timeline
- 2026-02-18: disclosed: Advisory published
- 2026-02-14: patched: Fix commit a429380e337152746031d290432a4b93aa553d55
- 2026-02-14: other: Patched version 2026.2.14 released