OpenClaw CVE-2026-100579

Exploitation requires (1) an OpenClaw Gateway running an identity-bearing authentication mode that honors caller identity and narrower operator scopes - NOT shared-secret token or password callers, who are full trusted operators and explicitly out of scope; (2) the attacker already holding a valid write-scoped (low-privilege) caller credential; and (3) at least one enabled channel action that relies on requester identity for its authorization decision. The attacker then supplies another sender's identifier to message.action's channel authorization check. Limiting factors: practical impact is bounded by the specific enabled channel, the invoked action, and the target account's permissions; default or shared-secret deployments are not affected; the documented workaround is to restrict message.action to administrators and disable sensitive identity-dependent channel actions.

This is a genuine but conditionally-scoped authorization flaw, not a high-CVSS-low-real-risk artifact. The CVSS 4.0 vector (AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:L/VI:H/VA:L) is coherent with the description: network-reachable, low complexity, and requiring only a low-privileged (write-scoped) caller with no user interaction, with integrity as the dominant impact (VI:H) and only minor confidentiality/availability effect. My independent 3.1 assessment (~7.3, AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:H/A:L) agrees. Crucially, the flaw only manifests in 'identity-bearing Gateway deployments' - auth modes that honor caller identity and narrower operator scopes; shared-secret token and password callers are explicitly out of scope because they are already full trusted operators. No EPSS score, no CISA KEV listing, and no public exploit code are present in the provided data - no public exploit identified at time of analysis. Practical impact is explicitly bounded by the enabled channel, the specific action, and the spoofed target account's permissions, so real-world blast radius varies by deployment. Note the 'Authentication Bypass' tag is a mislabel: CWE-639 and the mechanism (spoofing another sender's identifier to authorization checks) make this an authorization/IDOR-style provenance-trust flaw, not an authentication bypass.

In an OpenClaw Gateway configured with an identity-honoring authentication mode, an attacker who already holds a legitimate write-scoped (low-privilege) caller credential crafts a message.action request in which they substitute a different, higher-privileged sender's identifier. The channel authorization check trusts the supplied requester provenance and executes the channel action under the spoofed identity, performing operations the adapter would have denied the real caller. No public proof-of-concept is referenced in the available data.