--- title: Echo × NanoClaw: An under-the-hood look at our collaboration description: Echo details its process for hardening NanoClaw's container images, eliminating roughly 1,400 CVEs (about 99%). The workflow includes scanning with Trivy,... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/echo-nanoclaw-an-under-the-hood-look-at-our-collaboration-clnoox7x7 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Echo × NanoClaw: An under-the-hood look at our collaboration | daily.dev og:description: Echo details its process for hardening NanoClaw's container images, eliminating roughly 1,400 CVEs (about 99%). The workflow includes scanning with Trivy,... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/echo-nanoclaw-an-under-the-hood-look-at-our-collaboration-clnoox7x7 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/clNoOX7x7.png og:image:alt: Echo × NanoClaw: An under-the-hood look at our collaboration og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Echo × NanoClaw: An under-the-hood look at our collaboration **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 11 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Echo details its process for hardening NanoClaw's container images, eliminating roughly 1,400 CVEs (about 99%). The workflow includes scanning with Trivy, Grype, and Wiz, safely bumping backward-compatible libraries like Chromium, researching tricky version jumps, and backporting fixes for 'won't fix' vulnerabilities. A detailed walkthrough covers backporting CVE-2025-59375 in expat, an amplification vulnerability requiring invasive allocation-tracking changes across 9 files. Fixed images are pushed to the Echo store and continuously mirrored to NanoClaw's registry. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What makes CVE-2025-59375 in expat difficult to backport? It requires introducing real heap allocation accounting rather than a simple bounds check, because expat's existing billion-laughs defense only tracked parsed output bytes and never measured actual heap usage. A ~250 KiB crafted XML document could trigger roughly 800 MiB of allocation, an amplification factor of about 3,300, causing memory exhaustion. The upstream maintainer explicitly warned against a partial cherry-pick of the fix. _Track how deep security backports like this one get made by following expat and container hardening coverage on daily.dev._ ### What is CVE backporting and when should it be used instead of upgrading a dependency? Backporting takes a security patch from a newer package version and applies it to an older version still in use, rather than upgrading directly. It's used when a direct upgrade would require a major version jump that risks breaking the application, letting teams fix vulnerabilities marked 'won't fix' while staying compatible with existing source code and dependencies. _Compare backporting against upgrade strategies for your own dependency risk decisions on daily.dev._ ### Why did a renamed build guard macro almost cause a silent failed CVE patch in expat? The expat fix wraps a new allocation tracker in an #ifdef XML_DTD guard, but that macro was renamed to XML_GE starting in version 2.6.0. Keeping the old macro name would cause the preprocessor to silently drop the entire fix while still producing a green build and passing tests, leaving the vulnerability present despite scanners reporting a patched version. _Stay alert to version-specific gotchas like renamed build guards through daily.dev's developer coverage._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 43 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-13). **TL;DR:** Most commenters are skeptical that the '1,400 CVEs eliminated' framing reflects meaningful security work, arguing many findings are pro-forma, non-exploitable, or artifacts of the Node ecosystem's dependency sprawl rather than real risk. **Sentiment:** 5% positive · 25% mixed · 70% skeptical **The case for** - One commenter shared a live scan showing the underlying findings are genuine base-image and dependency CVEs, not fabricated. - Some note backported-fix false positives were more of an issue a decade ago since modern scanners now recognize vendor backports. **The pushback** - Many argue the overwhelming majority of counted CVEs are pro-forma or not meaningful to the actual product (e.g. prototype pollution, ReDoS in unused paths). - Several suspect this is a compliance/marketing exercise ('CV Enrichment' joke) rather than real security improvement. - Some question whether new CVEs were introduced while patching, or whether counts are deduplicated properly. - Multiple people question why the base image had ~1,400 CVEs after only ~7 months of the project existing. - One commenter was unimpressed by the installation/setup process, calling it loose and 'vibe coded' despite the security marketing. - Several are skeptical any 'claw-like' agent tool can be called secure without addressing prompt injection. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): Discussion leans heavily toward doubting that the CVE count and its reduction represent meaningful security improvement, with side debates on Node's dependency culture and threat modeling. **Hottest debate:** Whether the '1,400 CVEs' figure represents real security risk or is mostly a compliance-theater artifact of dependency scanning. **Open questions** - Are the counted CVEs deduplicated and confirmed to be exploitable rather than pro-forma findings? - Were any new CVEs introduced while patching the old ones? - What sandboxing does the product actually use? - Why did the base image accumulate so many CVEs in such a short project lifetime? **Highlights** > If you're not a security person, the unspoken subtext here: the overwhelming majority of these "CVEs" do not matter to the project, and a very large number of them don't matter at all. They're pro-forma findings, like ReDOS in code paths that are rarely used, or, even more commonly, "prototype pollution" issues. > — [tptacek on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49288662) > These are CVEs in the base image and in standard lib dependencies. For example, just scanned an unhardened image I built today: Unhardened: docker.io/nanoco/nanoclaw:agent-alpha 71 packages, 344 unique CVEs, linux/arm64 PACKAGE VERSION TYP C H M L N TOT ----------------------------------------------------------- expat 2.5.0 deb 0 4 18 1 2 25 curl 7.88.1 deb 4 4 6 0 7 21 hono 4.12.14 npm 0 1 18 2 0 21 libtiff 4.5.0 deb 0 2 1 1 15 20 perl 5.36.0 deb 5 6 3 0 3 17 pnpm 10.33.0 npm 0 8 7 0 0 15 glibc 2.36 deb 1 2 2 1 7 13 openjpeg 2.5.0 deb 0 0 3 1 9 13 cups 2.4.2 deb 0 2 8 0 1 11 glib2 2.74.6 deb 1 7 1 0 1 10 tar 1.34(+2) deb 1 1 7 0 1 10 llvm 15.0.6 deb 0 0 0 1 9 10 sqlite3 3.40.1 deb 1 2 3 0 3 9 nss 3.87.1 deb 1 0 3 0 4 8 avahi 0.8 deb 0 0 8 0 0 8 util-linux 2.38.1 deb 0 0 3 0 2 7 elf 0.188 deb 0 0 0 0 7 7 libssh2 1.10.0 deb 1 4 1 0 0 6 openldap 2.5.13 deb 0 1 0 0 5 6 chromium 151.0.7922.108 deb 0 5 0 0 0 5 ----------------------------------------------------------- UNIQUE CVEs 16 68 121 17 119 344 (+51 more packages, 102 findings) C/H/M/L/N = critical/high/medium/low/negligible. Counts are unique CVEs: binaries from one source package are grouped (libcurl4 + libcurl3-gnutls + curl = curl), so a CVE hitting three of them counts once, not three times. > — [GavCo on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49287506) > Because it's written in Javascript and there are classes of highly-situational and not-especially-meaningful vulnerabilities that broadly impact the entire ecosystem ("prototype pollution" is the canonical example) that get counted individually in every occurrence in every NPM package. It's not a real number, and, worse, it obscures the real figure of merit (/demerit). The Node ecosystem does have a real problem with its culture of sprawling dependencies. But it's not the first-order issue with this "1400" number. > — [tptacek on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289212) > For those unfamiliar, “CVE” stands for “CV Enrichment”, common slang in Posture Engineering > — [prymitive on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49288818) > I was intrigued by nano claws more “secure” marketing, but I couldn’t believe how loose and vibe coded the installation and set up process was. My god it’s full of prompts. > — [pokstad on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49292887) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49286357) · 58 points · 43 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The AI “vibe shift”: Why NanoClaw and Echo have teamed up to stop the next Hugging Face Breach](https://daily.dev/posts/the-ai-vibe-shift-why-nanoclaw-and-echo-have-teamed-up-to-stop-the-next-hugging-face-breach-r6qlvr1ep) · The New Stack · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [OpenClaw, but in containers: Meet NanoClaw](https://daily.dev/posts/openclaw-but-in-containers-meet-nanoclaw-rzz1wfyde) · The Register · 4 upvotes · 0 comments - [From zero to NanoClaw with Gavriel Cohen, creator of NanoClaw \(Changelog Interviews \#686\)](https://daily.dev/posts/from-zero-to-nanoclaw-with-gavriel-cohen-creator-of-nanoclaw-changelog-interviews-686--hix04zbgp) · Changelog · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Gavriel Cohen found his own code inside OpenClaw, so he walked away](https://daily.dev/posts/gavriel-cohen-found-his-own-code-inside-openclaw-so-he-walked-away-7lhr02ass) · The New Stack · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#security](https://daily.dev/tags/security), [#linux](https://daily.dev/tags/linux), [#containers](https://daily.dev/tags/containers) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/echo-nanoclaw-an-under-the-hood-look-at-our-collaboration-clnoox7x7) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Echo × NanoClaw: An under-the-hood look at our collaboration","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/echo-nanoclaw-an-under-the-hood-look-at-our-collaboration-clnoox7x7","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/echo-nanoclaw-an-under-the-hood-look-at-our-collaboration-clnoox7x7"},"datePublished":"2026-08-13T16:58:20.389Z","dateModified":"2026-08-13T23:18:05.434Z","description":"Echo details its process for hardening NanoClaw's container images, eliminating roughly 1,400 CVEs (about 99%). 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