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Vulnerability · Published Oct 31, 2024 · Assigned by GitHub_M

CVE-2024-51481Nix allows macOS sandbox escape via built-in builders

Low 1.0

In plain English

A low-severity security flaw in nix from NixOS. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.2% (higher than 6% of all known vulnerabilities).

Severity (CVSS 4.0)1.0Low
Exploit odds (30 days)0.2%top 93.5% of all CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: none
Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

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 products (as reported)

VendorProductVersions
NixOS nix < 2.18.9>= 2.19.0, < 2.19.7, 2.20.9, 2.21.5, 2.22.4, 2.23.4, 2.24.10>= 2.20.0, < 2.20.9>= 2.21.0, < 2.21.5>= 2.22.0, < 2.22.4>= 2.23.0, < 2.23.4>= 2.24.0, < 2.24.10

Weakness: CWE-693 · Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:H/AT:P/PR:L/UI:P/VC:L/VI:L/VA:N/SC:L/SI:L/SA:N

References