Is damirikys/faster-whisper-local safe?
https://github.com/openclaw/skills/tree/main/skills/damirikys/faster-whisper-local
The faster-whisper-local skill is a legitimate local speech-to-text tool with clean SKILL.md instructions and no prompt injection, exfiltration code, or malicious behaviors. The only material concerns are supply-chain risks inherent to ML tooling: unpinned faster-whisper and PyTorch dependencies and a third-party PyTorch index URL. Canary file accesses in the audit log are attributable to the audit framework's own verification sweeps, not the skill.
Category Scores
Findings (6)
LOW Unpinned PyPI and PyTorch dependencies -10 ▶
requirements.txt specifies faster-whisper>=1.0.0 (lower-bound only) and setup.sh installs torch without any version constraint. A future malicious release of either package would be automatically installed.
LOW PyTorch sourced from third-party index URL -8 ▶
setup.sh downloads PyTorch from download.pytorch.org/whl/cu121 rather than PyPI. While this is the standard recommended approach by Meta/PyTorch, it bypasses PyPI's audit trail.
LOW Canary file accesses observed (attributed to audit framework) -5 ▶
Credential files (.env, .ssh/id_rsa, .aws/credentials, etc.) appear in PATH audit records at two timestamps — 1771939939.255 (pre-install, 5 seconds before skill clone begins) and 1771939958.898 (post-install). Both access patterns are consistent with the audit framework's own canary baseline and verification sweeps. No skill code reads these paths.
LOW openclaw-gateway opens new outbound connections post-install -8 ▶
After install, the openclaw-gateway process (pid=1084) establishes connections to 34.233.6.177:443 (AWS) and 104.16.11.34:443 (Cloudflare) and opens listening ports 18790/18793. This is the ClawHub execution platform starting its gateway service, not the skill itself.
INFO ML model downloaded from internet on first run -2 ▶
The skill downloads the distil-large-v3 Whisper model (~756MB) from Hugging Face on first transcription. This is standard ML tooling behavior and is disclosed in SKILL.md.
INFO Unrelated skill present in lock.json 0 ▶
The .clawhub/lock.json file lists 'academic-research-hub' as a previously installed skill. This is a developer artifact from the skill author's own environment committed accidentally. It has no functional effect.