What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-36476: `calamares-nixos-extensions` LUKS keyfile exposure

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2023-06-29 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-200

Description

calamares-nixos-extensions provides Calamares branding and modules for NixOS, a distribution of GNU/Linux. Users of calamares-nixos-extensions version 0.3.12 and prior who installed NixOS through the graphical calamares installer, with an unencrypted `/boot`, on either non-UEFI systems or with a LUKS partition different from `/` have their LUKS key file in `/boot` as a plaintext CPIO archive attached to their NixOS initrd. A patch is available and anticipated to be part of version 0.3.13 to backport to NixOS 22.11, 23.05, and unstable channels. Expert users who have a copy of their data may, as a workaround, re-encrypt the LUKS partition(s) themselves.

Affected products

• NixOS calamares-nixos-extensions: before 0.3.13 — fixed in 0.3.13

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: NixOS calamares-nixos-extensions 0.3.13. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/NixOS/calamares-nixos-extensions/security/advisories/GHSA-3rvf-24q2-24ww
• https://github.com/osresearch/heads/issues/1348
• https://github.com/vlinkz/calamares-nixos-extensions/commit/837ca4da5521a74d3b5ca6f7b88890a6713faa22
• https://github.com/NixOS/calamares-nixos-extensions/security/advisories/GHSA-3rvf-24q2-24ww
• https://github.com/osresearch/heads/issues/1348
• https://github.com/vlinkz/calamares-nixos-extensions/commit/837ca4da5521a74d3b5ca6f7b88890a6713faa22

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