ClawTrap: A MITM-Based Red-Teaming Framework for Real-World OpenClaw Security Evaluation

arXiv:2603.18762v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Autonomous web agents such as textbfOpenClaw are rapidly moving into high-impact real-world workflows, but their security robustness under live network threats remains insufficiently evaluated. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on static sandbox settings and content-level prompt attacks, which leaves a practical gap for network-layer security testing. In this paper, we present textbfClawTrap, a textbfMITM-based red-teaming framework for real-world OpenClaw security evaluation. ClawTrap supports diverse and customizable attack forms, including textitStatic HTML Replacement, textitIframe Popup Injection, and textitDynamic Content Modification, and provides a reproducible pipeline for rule-driven interception, transformation, and auditing. This design lays the foundation for future research to construct richer, customizable MITM attacks and to perform systematic security testing across agent frameworks and model backbones. Our empirical study shows clear model stratification: weaker models are more likely to trust tampered observations and produce unsafe outputs, while stronger models demonstrate better anomaly attribution and safer fallback strategies. These findings indicate that reliable OpenClaw security evaluation should explicitly incorporate dynamic real-world MITM conditions rather than relying only on static sandbox protocols.