OpenClaw Skills Security: Permission Scopes for Money

The OpenClaw ecosystem rewards speed. Skills get installed quickly and iterated quickly.

That’s great—until a skill can spend money.

At that point you need a different mindset:

Treat “agent spend” as a security boundary, not a feature.

This post is a threat model + scoping checklist you can paste into any payment skill README.

If you want the “happy path” flow first: OpenClaw Payments: Intent → Card → Verify.

Threat model: what are we defending against?

1) Prompt injection

Agents browse. Web pages contain text. Some of that text is malicious.

Attack goal: convince the agent to buy something it shouldn’t, or to broaden its permissions (“increase limit”, “change merchant”, “export card details”).

2) Hallucination + misinterpretation

No attacker required. The agent simply makes a wrong decision:

• ▸quantity errors
• ▸misunderstanding constraints (“under $50” vs “$50 per item”)
• ▸wrong vendor due to SEO spam

3) Retry loops and ambiguous success

“503, try again” becomes “12 charges in 3 minutes.”

See: AI Agent Overspend Post-Mortem.

4) Credential leakage

If the LLM sees raw credentials, they can end up in:

• ▸logs
• ▸traces
• ▸conversation history
• ▸tool outputs

Once leaked, rotation is painful and audit becomes messy.

The only safe default: minimal permissions

Payment skills should be split into three primitives:

1. ▸Checkout (intent → credentials → verify)
2. ▸Policy (limits / merchant locks / approval gates)
3. ▸Reconcile (receipts + evidence logs)

The first mistake teams make is giving “checkout” full power without guardrails.

Scope checklist (copy/paste)

Allowed by default

• ▸signets.kyc.status
• ▸signets.balance.get
• ▸signets.intents.create
• ▸signets.intents.get
• ▸signets.intents.list
• ▸signets.transactions.list_for_card
• ▸signets.transactions.get

These let an agent propose actions and verify outcomes without leaking sensitive card data.

Tightly gated

• ▸signets.cards.get_sensitive

This should require:

• ▸intentId + reason
• ▸a short time window
• ▸an approval threshold
• ▸an execution context you control (not the chat transcript)

If your setup can’t guarantee a secure execution context, treat get_sensitive as “human-only”.

Why “intentId + reason” is not ceremony

It does three things:

1. ▸forces intent linkage (every PAN retrieval is tied to a declared purchase)
2. ▸makes abuse reviewable (humans can evaluate a natural-language reason)
3. ▸creates evidence (you can explain “why the agent got credentials”)

In practice, “reason” catches the most common agent failures:

• ▸vague intent (“buy stuff”)
• ▸wrong merchant (“book travel” → tries gambling site)
• ▸scope creep (“increase limit to be safe”)

The kill switch pattern

Every payment skill should document a default incident response:

If verification fails (merchant/amount mismatch):

1. ▸lock the card immediately (or let it auto-relock after the window)
2. ▸mark the intent “needs_review”
3. ▸alert a human
4. ▸attach evidence (intent + tool calls + transaction records)

Logging: what to store (and what not to store)

Store

• ▸intentId
• ▸cardId (not PAN)
• ▸amount + currency
• ▸merchant + descriptor
• ▸timestamps
• ▸policy decision (approved/denied/escalated)
• ▸“reason” string
• ▸transactionId

Never store

• ▸PAN
• ▸CVV
• ▸full expiry

If your environment makes this hard, the simplest answer is: don’t fetch sensitive card data at all in the skill runtime. Use a secure browser/payment executor that receives credentials out-of-band.

A 1-paragraph “Threat model” you can add to every README

Threat model: OpenClaw agents can be manipulated by prompt injection, can hallucinate constraints, and can enter retry loops that create duplicate charges. This skill requires a purchase intent before any credentials are issued/unlocked. Sensitive card details are gated by intentId + a human-readable reason and should only be used in a secure execution context. All spend is isolated to dedicated cards and every transaction is verified against intent and logged for audit.

Bottom line

If you want the OpenClaw distribution surface without the “agents are risky” backlash:

• ▸scope the skill to the minimum
• ▸require intent for everything
• ▸gate sensitive credentials hard
• ▸verify and log outcomes

The wedge isn’t “payments for agents.”

The wedge is payments that don’t blow up.