How the xz backdoor highlights a major flaw in Nix | Shade's Blog
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Background On Friday, March 29th, 2024, a historical and sophisticated security vulnerability (CVE-2024-3094) was discovered in the XZ Utils package and liblzma api in version 5.6.0 and 5.6.1. While this vulnerability mostly affects Debian and RedHat distributions, there was some interesting discussion regarding xz and Nix. How did this affect Nix and NixOS? The truth is not a whole lot in reality. I saw conflicting reports, but supposedly, the tarballs of xz that Nix downloads were not infected.

The main issue is the handling of security updates within the Nixpkgs ecosystem, which relies on Nix’s CI system, Hydra, to test and build packages. Due to the extensive number of packages in the Nixpkgs repository, the process can be slow, causing delays in the release of updates. As an example, the updated xz 5.4.6 package took nearly 5 days to become available in the unstable branch!

Fundamentally, there needs to be a change in how security fixes are handled in Hydra. As stated in the article, Nix was lucky to be unaffected, but multiple days to push out a security patch of this severity is concerning, even if there was no reason for concern.

  • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
    26·
    3 months ago

    Were systems in the stable branch at risk of compromise? Were there delays in releasing security fixes in the stable branch.

    • Auli@lemmy.caEnglish
      141·
      3 months ago

      I don’t even think unstable was suseptical to it. I don’t think Nix ties ssh to systemd. Debian and redhat do.

      • Atemu@lemmy.ml
        12·
        3 months ago

        It was not vulnerable to this particular attack because the attack didn’t specifically target Nixpkgs. It could have very well done so if they had wanted to.

        • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
          21·
          3 months ago

          AFAIK it was enabled in anything that used the official source tarball. The exploit binaries were added during the tarball build process.

      • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
        41·
        3 months ago

        Shouldn’t the lesson here be “don’t introduce more complexity and dependencies to critical software”?

        But then again that’s systemd in a nutshell…

    • Atemu@lemmy.ml
      5·
      3 months ago

      AFAIK, affected versions never made it to stable as there was no reason to backport it.