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We eliminated 1,400 CVEs in NanoClaw's container images

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Why This Matters

NanoClaw's recent efforts to eliminate 1,400 CVEs from its container images highlight the importance of proactive vulnerability management in the tech industry. This advancement not only enhances security for consumers but also demonstrates the effectiveness of comprehensive scanning and targeted patching strategies in maintaining secure open source projects.

Key Takeaways

Last week we announced Echo's partnership with NanoClaw, designed to extend the vision and security of the open source project. In this post, we want to pull back the curtain and show you exactly how Echo's agentic hardening process works.

How do we detect CVEs?

Before we can fix anything, we need a complete, trustworthy picture of what's actually in the image. We scan and analyze the upstream NanoClaw container using several independent vulnerability scanners, including Trivy, Grype, and Wiz. Here's the raw result of scanning the open source NanoClaw image with Grype, sorted by severity:

NanoClaw's default image scan results

And here's how that stacks up against comparable agent runtimes (Hermes and OpenClaw) across both Grype and Trivy (we also added the NanoClaw Echo image to this comparison - which we will dive into soon):

Now, let’s move to the fixing and CVE reduction.

Step 1: Start with what we can safely bump

Every library in the image is its own problem to solve. So the first thing we do is separate the findings into "safe to bump" and "needs real work." The easy wins are the libraries we know we can upgrade without breaking NanoClaw. Chromium is a great example. It's well known for backward compatibility, so we can trust their updates and bump with confidence. What we are left with are the CVEs that can’t be fixed, and the ones with major jumps. Once we strip out the Chromium-related CVEs, we're still left with roughly 600 vulnerabilities that need fixing. So what happens next?

Step 2: The bumps that require real research

Some upgrades require a major version jump, which will likely not work out of the box. In these cases, we have to patch it ourselves and verify the patch actually holds without breaking the app. See below, a concrete example: Hono's node-server

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