Executive brief
OpenClaw is a sandbox management tool for containers and browsers. A race condition in the sandbox registry allows concurrent operations to overwrite each other, potentially losing configuration updates or restoring deleted sandbox entries. This can cause sandboxes to become out of sync with expected state, affecting sandbox listing, pruning, and recreation operations.
Technical details
The vulnerability is a classic race condition (CWE-362) in read-modify-write operations for the sandbox registry. Concurrent calls to updateRegistry and removeRegistryEntry lack proper locking, allowing multiple threads/processes to read stale registry state and write back conflicting versions. The permissive fallback parsing in the registry logic compounds the issue by allowing corrupted or partial updates. An attacker with local access to trigger concurrent sandbox operations can cause sandbox state desynchronization, affecting downstream commands like sandbox list, sandbox prune, and sandbox recreate --all. The vulnerability affects openclaw versions up to 2026.2.17; patches are available in version 2026.2.18 or later.
Affected products
- OpenClaw OpenClaw <=2026.2.17
Timeline
- 2026-02-21: disclosed
- 2026-02-19: patched: Version 2026.2.18+ contains the fix
- 2026-03-03: other: Published as GHSA-2026-03-03T23:32:49Z