OpenClaw’s first-party MCP bridge only supports stdio, so hosted clients such as ChatGPT and Claude cannot connect to it. Making it available over Streamable HTTP solves the transport problem, but raises a harder question: how do you preserve authenticated user identity all the way into OpenClaw?

This talk shows how OpenClaw’s trusted-proxy authentication mode, a Gateway feature I implemented upstream, can bridge that gap. An identity-aware proxy handles the MCP OAuth flow, evaluates access policy, and rejects unauthorized requests before they reach the bridge. The bridge then carries the authenticated identity into OpenClaw through trusted-proxy auth mode, instead of bypassing authentication or falling back to a shared token.

I will live-demo the full flow using Pomerium, an open core identity-aware proxy: a hosted MCP client, OAuth and policy enforcement, a Streamable HTTP bridge, and an unmodified OpenClaw Gateway. Attendees will leave with an open source blueprint for securely exposing a self-hosted assistant as a remote MCP server.