OpenClaw Signals: Dead Letter Queues, Fingerprinting, and the Auth Handshake Overhaul

Security

Integrity Fingerprinting for Cached Artifacts

This PR introduces SHA-256 fingerprinting for all intermediate build artifacts to prevent cache poisoning attacks. It’s a necessary security step to ensure that a compromised dependency doesn't propagate silently through the pipeline.

Performance

Refactor: Auth Handshake Bypass for Trusted Internal Networks

Shaving latency off the initialization sequence by allowing trusted peers to bypass the full cryptographic handshake. This is a practical performance win for clusters running behind a secure, unified load balancer.

Optimization

Proposal: Atomic Bulk Operations for Mass State Transitions

Individual state updates become a bottleneck at scale; this proposal adds atomic bulk transitions to the core API. If merged, it will significantly cut network overhead for high-frequency scheduling workflows.

Reliability

Refactoring the Stale Worker Reclamation Logic

The current heartbeat timeout mechanism is being reworked to better distinguish between network latency and actual worker crashes. This fix prevents premature task reassignment, which was causing split-brain issues in distributed setups.