OpenClaw v2026.11.1 is out, and it needs a Gateway restart to apply its certificate change

OpenClaw published v2026.11.1 on 5 November 2026, and the GitHub releases page marks it Latest, so openclaw update on the stable channel is what takes you to it. One thing in it is not optional: the release rejects certificate chains that rely on what the notes call the distrusted emSign ECC G3 root, and the same bullet tells you to "restart the Gateway after updating, and update clients with independent trust stores separately". Take the update, then restart the Gateway. Everything else is a large but ordinary pile of reliability work.

When this post was published on 5 November, OpenClaw's own documentation did not cover the release: the notes page for it returned a 404 and the index did not list the version. That has since changed. The documentation now has its own release notes page for v2026.11.1, and it is worth reading as well as the GitHub tag page rather than instead of it, because it sorts the work into named sections including Security and Privacy and it spells out several steps to take by hand.

#What does v2026.11.1 actually change?

The tag page sorts the work into Highlights, Changes and Fixes, and records 78 pull requests from 49 contributors over a commit range starting at v2026.10.10. Seven highlights, and the first is the one with a security edge to it: Mac settings are safer, in that a failed configuration save no longer overwrites stored secrets, and turning off Tailscale exposure no longer takes Gateway authentication down with it.

The rest of the highlights are availability work of the kind that matters for an agent you leave running. Telegram, Discord and webhook conversations reach the agent more reliably. Conversations survive more interruptions, including oversized turns and stopped Claude CLI turns. Update recovery now handles crashed or cancelled updaters and restores the Windows Gateway after a failed verification. Subagents keep their follow-ups across model and session changes, and parent sessions receive child approvals. Android End Talk stops listening without cancelling work the agent has already accepted. Provider recovery respects the rate-limit timing a provider asks for.

One entry under Changes is worth reading before you upgrade rather than after: native Agent and Workflow orchestration is opt-in and off by default. The others are narrower. The Claude CLI can use saved subscription accounts, Anthropic API-key setup can record an optional workspace ID, Google Interactions requests honour proxy and TLS settings, Bedrock Mantle routes numbered OpenAI GPT models to the Responses API automatically, the Control UI model picker shows the active context budget, and Google Chat sends remote attachments as links alongside captions.

#Why do you need to restart the Gateway?

Because the fix lives in a process that is already running. The secret egress entry says the release rejects chains relying on the distrusted emSign ECC G3 root, and then gives the instruction in the same breath: "restart the Gateway after updating, and update clients with independent trust stores separately."

That second clause is the one people skip. A client that keeps its own trust store does not inherit the Gateway's decision, so updating OpenClaw does nothing for it. If you have apps or tunnels in that position, they need their own updates.

This is not the first time OpenClaw's secret egress proxy has had certificate work done to it. The documentation for v2026.10.8 describes that release as adding "remediations for the eMudhra certificate compromise in the secret egress proxy and its exported trust bundle", with the same two instructions: "Restart the Gateway to apply the change" and "Apps with independent trust stores and bypass tunnels need their own updates." That page is also blunt about the cost, which applies here too: "Connections relying only on the excluded root will fail." If something stops connecting after you update and restart, that sentence is the first place to look.

What we are not saying is that these are the same root. The v2026.10.8 documentation names eMudhra and calls the root only "the excluded root", without naming it; the v2026.11.1 notes name the emSign ECC G3 root and do not mention eMudhra. No page we read states the relationship between the two, so we do not assert one. Our earlier coverage of the Node requirement in v2026.10.6 deals with the eMudhra compromise as OpenClaw described it at the time.

#What else is in the security fixes?

The GitHub tag page has no section called Security. The security-relevant items sit inside Fixes, under topic labels inside the bullets rather than under headings of their own, which is worth knowing if you scan that page for a Security heading and conclude there is nothing in one. The documentation's own release notes page does group them, under Security and Privacy.

Two of those are worth a second read. The log redaction fix means a malformed custom redaction entry used to be able to switch off valid rules and built-in secret protection, so anyone who has written custom redaction policy has had a reason to check it. And the two network entries both describe the same shape of problem, a request following a redirect or a download inheriting access into somewhere private, which is the surface our OpenClaw security hardening guide covers in general terms.

#Which version do OpenClaw's own pages say is current?

They agree, which is new. For several releases the documentation index trailed GitHub and put its "latest" label on an older version; today both surfaces point at v2026.11.1.

The last two rows changed on 6 November. When this post was published the day before, the index did not list the release and its notes page returned a 404, which is why the sections above take their quotations from the GitHub tag page. Where the two surfaces carry different detail, this article says which page a quotation came from.

#How do you upgrade?

The documented path is the built-in updater:

openclaw update
openclaw update --dry-run
openclaw update status

--dry-run previews the "planned actions (channel/tag/target/restart flow)" and runs "without writing config, installing, syncing plugins, or restarting", so it is the safe way to see what the update intends to do. openclaw update status inspects "the current branch, version, and update availability".

One flag deserves naming because of this particular release, and what it does depends on how you installed OpenClaw. openclaw update --no-restart skips "the updater's managed restart and trailing Gateway readiness wait, including failure recovery". On a global npm, pnpm or bun install the page says the flag "skips only the updater's managed restart" and that "The running Gateway restarts itself when its watcher detects the replaced installation", so the restart still happens without you. Only "For Git checkouts and immutable preparation-only updates" does --no-restart leave "activation to the operator", and there the page says to restart through the installation's service owner when you are ready. Since this release's certificate change takes effect on restart, check which of those two describes your install before you assume it has been applied.

For verification, the tag page publishes a release SHA of 4ffdd2047d192dd65554de3c8c46c0e0197c6e2a and an npm package version of 2026.11.1. If the update leaves you worse off, the troubleshooting guide is the place to start, and the migration guide covers the larger version jumps.

#What we could not confirm

Whether the emSign ECC G3 root is the root v2026.10.8 excluded. The two pages name different things, as described above, and neither connects them. We needed a page that names both, and did not find one, so the article treats them as two separately documented changes rather than one story.

The exact publication time zone, and the year. The tag page shows the release as published at "05 Nov 09:48" with no year and no explicit time zone. The year is taken from the calendar version tag, which names 2026 directly.

Whether a security advisory exists for any of these fixes. None of the entries cites a CVE or GHSA identifier, and we did not search the advisory list for this release, so no identifier is given here and we are not claiming none exists.

#Where to go next

If you run OpenClaw, take this update and restart the Gateway afterwards, then check any client that keeps its own certificate trust store. If you were on v2026.10.7, our coverage of v2026.10.10 sets out the security work in 2026.10.8 and 2026.10.9; coming from further back, or up to this release, you pass more than those two, including the certificate change above.

The OpenClaw platform hub tracks the setup and hardening guides, and what OpenClaw is is the starting point if you have arrived here without one installed.