Credential Hygiene, Lean Containers, and the Async Switchover

Security

Credential sanitization patch lands to prevent token leakage

A critical patch was merged that hardens the credential management flow. For anyone running OpenClaw in a multi-tenant or CI environment, this is a mandatory update to close a privilege escalation vector.

Platform

Alpine Linux support benchmarked against standard images

This issue documents the first official benchmarks comparing the newly supported Alpine Linux (musl libc) environment against GNU libc. Early results show a ~15% smaller container footprint with negotiable performance trade-offs, making lean production builds more feasible.

Tooling

Diagnostic snapshot capability added to CLI doctor command

A new debugging hook was added to the openclaw doctor command that can now generate a full diagnostic snapshot of your local and remote environments. This should drastically cut down on back-and-forth when filing bugs.

Breaking Change

Sync-mode deprecation officially scheduled for next minor release

The plan to remove the legacy synchronous execution mode has been formally accepted. If your automation scripts still rely on --sync flags or blocking calls, you now have 30 days to migrate to the async queue model before it errors out.