The Catalyst: The Interface Is the Attack Surface WhatsApp is the ultimate low-friction interface: it is on every phone, it is end-to-end encrypted in transit, and it is still a public port to your life if you wire a powerful agent behind it. The brain can be perfect; the connection is where pairing, allowlists, and gateway auth decide who gets to talk to the machine at all. Phase 4 of the Practical Guide series is The Connection : gateway, plugin, channel policy, DM scoping, and groups. I run the gateway on the host (no Docker in my day-to-day path). Overview Parts 1 to 3 already gave you a model , Silas / policy , and media scopes . This article is where those meet the real wire : who may send messages, how the OpenClaw gateway sees them, and how session keys line up with tools.media keyPrefix rules from the Senses article. Expect more channel wiring here than in part 1, not a second lecture on the same openclaw.json fields from scratch.…