Our Security Model: Why Open Source Is Safer
Our Security Model: Why Open Source Is Safer
When we tell people that SafeClaw is fully open source, including all security-critical code, we sometimes get a concerned reaction: "Doesn't that make it easier for attackers to find vulnerabilities?"
No. It makes it easier for everyone to find vulnerabilities. And that's precisely the point.
The Closed Source Illusion
Closed source security tools rely on a principle called "security through obscurity" — the idea that hiding the implementation makes it harder to attack. This principle has been consistently debunked by the security community for decades.
Attackers don't need source code to find vulnerabilities. They have decompilers, fuzzers, black-box testing frameworks, and time. Obscurity slows them down slightly, but it slows down defenders much more — because defenders can't audit what they can't see.
A closed source security tool asks you to trust the vendor's claims without evidence. You can't verify that the policy engine actually enforces the policies it claims to. You can't confirm that the audit log contains every action. You can't check for backdoors, telemetry, or data exfiltration.
For a tool that sits between an AI agent and your system — a tool that sees every file, every command, every secret — that's an extraordinary amount of blind trust.
Our Model
SafeClaw's security model is built on three open source principles:
Transparency — Every line of code that makes a safety decision is publicly available on GitHub. The policy engine, the action classifier, the secrets redaction engine, the workspace boundary enforcer — all of it. You can read it, audit it, and verify that it does what we say it does. Community Review — Open source doesn't just mean "source available." It means a community of developers and security researchers can (and do) review the code, report issues, and submit improvements. More eyes on security-critical code means more bugs found and fixed. Reproducible Builds — You can build SafeClaw from source and verify that the binary you're running matches the code you've reviewed. There's no gap between "what the source says" and "what the binary does."Threat Model
Our published threat model defines what SafeClaw protects against and what it doesn't:
In scope: Accidental harmful actions by well-intentioned agents, credential exposure, scope violations, budget overruns, and unmonitored execution. Partially in scope: Adversarial prompt injection that causes an agent to take harmful actions. SafeClaw catches the harmful actions regardless of why the agent attempted them, but it doesn't detect or prevent the injection itself. Out of scope: Compromise of the host operating system, attacks on SafeClaw's own process, and social engineering of human approvers. These require defenses at other layers.We publish this threat model because we want users to understand exactly what SafeClaw does and doesn't protect them from. Overstating our protection would be worse than understating it.
Responsible Disclosure
We operate a responsible disclosure program for security vulnerabilities in SafeClaw. Researchers who find vulnerabilities can report them through our published process and receive acknowledgment in our security advisories. We take every report seriously and aim to issue patches within 48 hours of confirmation.
The Trust Equation
When you install a security tool, you're extending your trust perimeter. The tool gains access to everything it's supposed to protect. If the tool itself is compromised or malicious, you've made your security worse, not better.
Open source minimizes this trust extension. You don't have to trust us — you can verify. And if you do trust us, it's because our track record is public, our code is auditable, and our security model is transparent.
SafeClaw's security model is documented in detail in our docs. We invite scrutiny. The best security tool is the one that can withstand it.