CVE-2024-51481: low-severity vulnerability in NixOS nix
Nix allows macOS sandbox escape via built-in builders
Published
E-mail alert when it lands in KEV, gets a public PoC or its score goes up.
8Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 1epss 0.2%
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.
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
Affected products
NixOS · nixRelated CVEs — NixOS nix
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2024-45593CRITICALNix affected by unsafe NAR unpackingEPSS 0.6%CVE-2024-27297MEDIUMNix Corruption of fixed-output derivationsEPSS 0.6%CVE-2024-47174MEDIUMCredential leak when credentials are used with `<nix/fetchurl.nix>`EPSS 0.3%CVE-2026-39860CRITICALNix sandbox escape: file write via symlink at FOD `.tmp` copy destinationEPSS 0.2%CVE-2025-53819HIGHNix's privilege dropping to build user broke for macOSEPSS 0.1%CVE-2024-38531LOWNix sandbox escapeEPSS 0.1%