CVE assignment is pending.
Fixes are available, and users are strongly encouraged to upgrade.
For full details (affected versions, fixed releases, mitigations), see:
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/security-advisory-local-privilege-escalation-in-lix-and-nix/77407
Martin
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.
An issue was discovered in the nix crate 0.16.0 and later before 0.20.2, 0.21.x before 0.21.2, and 0.22.x before 0.22.2 for Rust. unistd::getgrouplist has an out-of-bounds write if a user is in more than 16 /etc/groups groups.