OpenClaw affected by iMessage remote attachment SCP hardening (strict host-key checks and remoteHost validation)

Summary

Remote iMessage attachment fetches used SCP with trust-on-first-use host-key behavior and accepted unvalidated remote host tokens.

Before the fix:

• SCP used StrictHostKeyChecking=accept-new in the remote attachment path.
• channels.imessage.remoteHost was not validated as a strict SSH host token.

Impact

In remote iMessage deployments that use SCP attachment fetching, a first-connection MITM/DNS-poisoning scenario could cause the wrong host key to be trusted. Unsafe remote host token values could also alter SCP argument semantics.

Affected Packages / Versions

• Package: openclaw (npm)
• Latest published npm version currently affected: 2026.2.17
• Vulnerable range (structured field): <= 2026.2.17
• Patched version (pre-set for next release): >= 2026.2.19

Fix

The fix hardens remote attachment SSH/SCP handling by:

• requiring StrictHostKeyChecking=yes for SCP and SSH tunnel paths,
• adding strict remoteHost normalization/validation,
• adding -- argument barrier for SCP remote source parsing,
• validating channels.imessage.remoteHost in config schema,
• rejecting unsafe auto-detected host tokens at runtime.

Fix Commit(s)

• Pushed to main: 49d0def6d1e88f002026b1d2a35aa615d48a751a

OpenClaw thanks @allsmog for reporting.