Executive brief
OpenClaw is a package utility that extracts ZIP and TAR archives during installation and updates. An attacker can craft malicious archives with high compression ratios or excessive file counts that consume excessive CPU, memory, and disk space, causing the application to become unresponsive or crash during archive extraction.
Technical details
The vulnerability is a resource exhaustion (CWE-400) and uncontrolled resource consumption (CWE-770) flaw in the extractArchive function in src/infra/archive.ts. The archive extraction logic lacks proper resource budgets, allowing specially crafted ZIP or TAR archives with extreme expansion ratios to consume excessive system resources. An attacker can trigger this by providing a malicious archive file during installation or update flows, which do not require authentication. The fix implements enforced resource budgets including entry count limits, extracted byte limits, and for ZIP archives, a compressed size limit. Patches are available in openclaw v2026.2.14 and later.
Affected products
- OpenClaw openclaw <=2026.2.13
- OpenClaw clawdbot <=2026.1.24-3
Timeline
- 2026-02-18: disclosed: Advisory published on GitHub and OSV
- 2026-02-18: patched: Patches available in openclaw v2026.2.14