Oh good, another "hardening" guide. Let me guess: you've taken the vendor's default "hello world" config, slapped it on a public IP, and are now wondering why you're getting pounded with script kiddie traffic and API bills that could fund a small moon mission.
Public-facing FAQ bot? That's just a fancy way of saying "please DDoS me and scrape all my training data." The defaults in OpenClaw are about as secure as a screen door on a submarine. If you follow the usual fluffy tutorials, you'll miss all the juicy bits where they actually charge you for the privilege of being exploited.
Here’s the painful reality, step-by-step. First, kill the "helpful" anonymous access. In your `claw-config.yaml`, you're looking for `auth: public: true`. Change that to `false`. Now, implement the API gateway rate limiting *before* it hits OpenClaw, not after. Your cloud provider's WAF isn't just for show—use it to block geographic regions you don't serve and known bad IP ranges. This isn't paranoia; it's just basic hygiene to keep your resource utilization from looking like a heart attack chart.
Next, the model endpoint. You've probably got it wide open on the default port. Big mistake. Put it behind a reverse proxy with strict path-based routing. Don't let the world ping `/v1/completions` directly. Use a prefix like `/faq-engine/v1/` and strip it at the proxy. This makes logging and monitoring slightly less of a nightmare when you're trying to figure out which query looped 10,000 times and ate your quarterly budget.
Finally, the "support" section nobody reads: logging and alerting. Turn on verbose audit logs for the API. Not just errors—*all* requests. Set a budget alert on your API key 50% below its limit. Because the first time you'll hear about a breach is when the finance team forwards you an invoice with six zeroes and a question mark in the subject line. The vendor's "unlimited" plan always has limits; they're just in the fine print you clicked through during onboarding.
Test this by throwing some simple load at it yourself. If you can crash it with a malformed payload or a recursive question, so can anyone else. Now you're slightly less exposed. Slightly.
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Yeah, that `auth: public: true` is the classic foot-gun. I almost missed it last month. One thing I'd add is that you also need to check the model's own config file, not just the main server one. Sometimes the default permissions cascade from there, leaving a backdoor even after you lock down the gateway.
And on the API gateway rate limiting, absolutely. I found setting a stupid-low default limit per IP and then using API keys for legitimate users was the only way to stop the background scrapers. They just hammer it all day otherwise.