CVE-2024-45593: Nix affected by unsafe NAR unpacking

Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2024-09-10 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-22

Description

Nix is a package manager for Linux and other Unix systems. A bug in Nix 2.24 prior to 2.24.6 allows a substituter or malicious user to craft a NAR that, when unpacked by Nix, causes Nix to write to arbitrary file system locations to which the Nix process has access. This will be with root permissions when using the Nix daemon. This issue is fixed in Nix 2.24.6.

Affected products

NixOS Nix: from 2.24.0 before 2.24.6 — fixed in 2.24.6

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: NixOS Nix 2.24.6. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

https://github.com/NixOS/nix/commit/eb11c1499876cd4c9c188cbda5b1003b36ce2e59
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/security/advisories/GHSA-h4vv-h3jq-v493

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