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.
  • AtemuEnglish
    1•19 days ago

    Those packages themselves depend on xz. Pretty much all of them.

    What you’re suggesting would only make the xz executable not be backdoored anymore but any other application using liblzma would still be as vulnerable as before. That’s actually the only currently known attack vector; inject malicious code into SSHD via liblzma.