GHSA-p536-vvpp-9mc8 is a medium-severity (CVSS 6.5) vulnerability in openclaw. A fix is available for openclaw — see the affected versions and patch details below.
OpenClaw has a Web Fetch DoS via unbounded response parsing
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for GHSA-p536-vvpp-9mc8.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
GHSA-p536-vvpp-9mc8 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 378,156 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
How broadly this vulnerability is actually deployed: weekly install volume shows current usage, and reverse-dependency count shows how many other packages break if it stays unpatched.
openclawnpmDescription
Summary
The web_fetch tool could be used to crash the OpenClaw Gateway process (OOM / resource exhaustion) by fetching and attempting to parse attacker-controlled web pages with oversized response bodies or pathological HTML nesting.
Affected Packages / Versions
- Package:
openclaw(npm) - Affected versions:
<= 2026.2.14 - Fixed versions:
>= 2026.2.15
Impact
An attacker can social-engineer a user (or any automation that uses web_fetch) into fetching a malicious URL that returns extremely large or deeply nested HTML. The Gateway may exhaust memory or become unresponsive, causing a denial of service.
Fix
The Gateway now caps the downloaded response body size before any HTML parsing and adds additional guards to avoid running Readability/DOM parsing on pathological HTML.
Fix Commit(s)
- 166cf6a3e04c7df42bea70a7ad5ce2b9df46d147
Release Process Note
This advisory is prepared for the next npm release. Once [email protected] is published, publish this advisory without further edits.
Thanks @xuemian168 for reporting.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📦npm | openclaw | all versions | 2026.2.15npm install openclaw@2026.2.15 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for openclaw, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update openclaw to 2026.2.15 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-p536-vvpp-9mc8 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like GHSA-p536-vvpp-9mc8 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-p536-vvpp-9mc8. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-p536-vvpp-9mc8 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-p536-vvpp-9mc8 across npm dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.