Yeah, guess I’ll never understand that whole agentic ai craze. To me it basically looks like
we have a tool that is relatively simple to trick into doing what it’s not supposed to. Let’s feed it arbitrary data and give it the ability to execute arbitrary code!
It’s not arbitrary code in this case, it’s well defined functions, like list emails, read email, delete email. The agentic portion only decides if it should have those functions invoked.
Now if they should is up for debate. Personally I would be afraid it would delete an important email that it incorrectly marks as spam, but others may see value.
Yes, that’s pretty much all an mcp server is, that’s what I’m trying to explain. The ai just chooses what commands out of a list. Each command can be disabled or enabled. Everyone freaking out here like it has sudo access or something when you opt into everything it does
It’s not arbitrary code in this case, it’s well defined functions
No, you’re 100% wrong as the bot can just directly run arbitrary bash commands as well as write arbitrary code to a file and run the file. There’s probably a dozen different ways it can run arbitrary code and many more ways it can be exposed to malicious instructions from the internet.
Yeah, great, except the bot can literally just write whatever it wants to the config file ~/.openclaw/exec-approvals.json and give itself approval to execute bash commands.
There’s probably a hundred trivial ways to get around these permissions and approval requirements. I’ve played around with this bot and also opencode, and have witnessed opencode bypass permissions in real time by just coming up with a different way to do the thing it is wanting to do.
Yeah, guess I’ll never understand that whole agentic ai craze. To me it basically looks like
It’s not arbitrary code in this case, it’s well defined functions, like list emails, read email, delete email. The agentic portion only decides if it should have those functions invoked.
Now if they should is up for debate. Personally I would be afraid it would delete an important email that it incorrectly marks as spam, but others may see value.
You’ve just described an api…
Yes, that’s pretty much all an mcp server is, that’s what I’m trying to explain. The ai just chooses what commands out of a list. Each command can be disabled or enabled. Everyone freaking out here like it has sudo access or something when you opt into everything it does
No, you’re 100% wrong as the bot can just directly run arbitrary bash commands as well as write arbitrary code to a file and run the file. There’s probably a dozen different ways it can run arbitrary code and many more ways it can be exposed to malicious instructions from the internet.
If you allow it to run bash commands, it requires approval before running them:
https://docs.openclaw.ai/tools/exec-approvals
Yeah, great, except the bot can literally just write whatever it wants to the config file
~/.openclaw/exec-approvals.jsonand give itself approval to execute bash commands.There’s probably a hundred trivial ways to get around these permissions and approval requirements. I’ve played around with this bot and also opencode, and have witnessed opencode bypass permissions in real time by just coming up with a different way to do the thing it is wanting to do.
You honestly think there isn’t an issue with that?!