CVE-2024-51481

Summary

Nix is a package manager for Linux and other Unix systems. On macOS, built-in builders (such as builtin:fetchurl, exposed to users with import <nix/fetchurl.nix>) were not executed in the macOS sandbox. Thus, these builders (which are running under the nixbld* users) had read access to world-readable paths and write access to world-writable paths outside of the sandbox. This issue is fixed in 2.18.9, 2.19.7, 2.20.9, 2.21.5, 2.22.4, 2.23.4, and 2.24.10. Note that sandboxing is not enabled by default on macOS. The Nix sandbox is not primarily intended as a security mechanism, but as an aid to improve reproducibility and purity of Nix builds. However, sandboxing can mitigate the impact of other security issues by limiting what parts of the host system a build has access to.

Affected Software

VendorProductVersion RangeStatus
NixOSnix< 2.18.9affected
NixOSnix>= 2.19.0, < 2.19.7, 2.20.9, 2.21.5, 2.22.4, 2.23.4, 2.24.10affected
NixOSnix>= 2.20.0, < 2.20.9affected
NixOSnix>= 2.21.0, < 2.21.5affected
NixOSnix>= 2.22.0, < 2.22.4affected
NixOSnix>= 2.23.0, < 2.23.4affected
NixOSnix>= 2.24.0, < 2.24.10affected

Weaknesses

  • CWE-693: CWE-693: Protection Mechanism Failure

ADP Enrichment

CISA ADP Vulnrichment

  • SSVC:
  • Exploitation: none
    • Automatable: no
    • Technical Impact: partial

References