Openclaw CVE-2026-22217

The CVSS 3.1 score of 5.3 reflects moderate severity with important context: the attack vector is local (AV:L) requiring an attacker to have system access, the complexity is high (AC:H), and low privileges are needed (PR:L), meaning a regular user account can trigger it. The impact is notable—integrity is fully compromised (I:H, arbitrary code execution) and availability is degraded (A:L), but confidentiality is unaffected (C:N). In practice, this poses significant risk in multi-user environments or containerized deployments where users have home directories or can write to shared package directories like /opt/homebrew/bin. The availability of a vendor patch and documented proof-of-concept strengthen the priority for remediation. While the CVSS is moderate, the combination of local execution capability, lack of user interaction requirement, and clear privilege escalation path makes this a genuine priority, particularly for systems where OpenClaw runs with elevated privileges or in contexts where local user compromise leads to lateral movement.

An unprivileged local user on a macOS system with Homebrew installed identifies that /opt/homebrew/bin is world-writable or writable by their user group. The attacker creates a malicious shell script named 'sh' in that directory and sets their $SHELL environment variable to point to a non-existent path. When they launch OpenClaw, the application attempts to resolve the $SHELL variable, fails to find the primary shell, and falls back to searching /opt/homebrew/bin where it discovers the attacker's malicious 'sh' binary. OpenClaw executes this binary in its process context, allowing the attacker to run arbitrary commands with OpenClaw's privileges, potentially escalating to higher privilege levels or compromising sensitive data processed by the application.