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evil-nix

This is a Nix library that allows you to download files from the internet without needing to provide an output hash. It even works in Nix's pure-eval mode.

This library relies on Nix's support for SHA1, an unsafe hash function. It utilizes known SHA1 hash collisions in order to sneak single bits of data out of fixed-output derivations.

This library is comically inefficient, and should never be used in any actual codebase. But it is a fun trick!

Usage

This library provides an evilDownloadUrl function, which takes a single URL as an argument, and downloads the file.

WARNING: evilDownloadUrl is terribly inefficient. It may use up significant disk space, and DOS the site you're trying to download from. I don't recommend using it to download a file larger than 50 bytes or so (unless you really know what you're doing). The reasons for this inefficiency are explained in the next section.

This section uses an example file that is only a few bytes long, so in general it should be safe to test out and play around with.

You can play around with this function in the Nix REPL:

$ nix repl ./nix
nix-repl> :b evilDownloadUrl "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cdepillabout/small-example-text-files/177c95e490cf44bcc42860bf0652203d3dc87900/hello-world.txt"

This derivation produced the following outputs:
  out -> /nix/store/jhyzz6l9ryjl1npdf4alqyi1fy2qx1f0-fetchBytes-6bba65f4567f4165109177a5dafd5972882643e15d454018586fed35b068acf5-12

You can confirm that this file actually contains the contents of the URL:

$ cat /nix/store/jhyzz6l9ryjl1npdf4alqyi1fy2qx1f0-fetchBytes-6bba65f4567f4165109177a5dafd5972882643e15d454018586fed35b068acf5-12
hello world
$ curl "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cdepillabout/small-example-text-files/177c95e490cf44bcc42860bf0652203d3dc87900/hello-world.txt"
hello world

There is also a top-level default.nix file that can be used to play around with this function:

$ nix-build --argstr url "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cdepillabout/small-example-text-files/177c95e490cf44bcc42860bf0652203d3dc87900/hello-world.txt"
$ cat ./result
hello world

You can also use the flake.nix file to play around with this. First, edit ./flake.nix and replace url = "..." with the URL you want to download. Then, build the default package in the flake:

$ nix build
$ cat ./result
hello world

The neat (evil) thing about evilDownloadUrl is that it even works in Nix's pure-eval mode. In theory, pure-eval is supposed to require all downloaded files to have a hash specified, but evilDownloadUrl works around this limitation:

$ nix build --pure-eval
$ cat ./result
hello world

Extreme Inefficiency

Due to the way this hack works, evilDownloadUrl is extremely inefficient. It performs one request to the URL for every bit (!!) of the file it is trying to download. For instance, if you were trying to download a 10 byte file, evilDownloadUrl would make 80 requests to the URL, and download the file 80 times.

evilDownloadUrl also makes a lot of garbage in your Nix store. Downloading a 50 byte file creates about 4MB of garbage in your Nix store. This scales linearly, so for example a 100 byte would create about 8MB of garbage.

It is also very slow. Downloading a 50 byte file takes about 30 seconds on my machine.

While this is a fun library, you should never use this in any actual codebase.

Clean Up /nix/store

After playing around with evilDownloadUrl, you may want to clean up the garbage in your Nix store. While you should always be able to use nix-collect-garbage to clean up your Nix store, you may want to specifically only delete files created by evilDownloadUrl.

First, make sure you don't have the result output creating a GC root:

$ rm ./result

Then, delete files created by evilDownloadUrl:

$ shopt -s nullglob   # you may want to enable null globs in Bash to ignore globs that don't match
$ nix-store --delete /nix/store/*-bitvalue-* /nix/store/*BitNum-* /nix/store/*-fetchFileSize* /nix/store/*-fetchByte*

How does this work?

The evilDownloadUrl function works by internally creating a fixed-output derivation which outputs one of two known PDF files, both with the same SHA1 hash. This fixed-output derivation is allowed to access the network, and outputs one PDF file to represent a single 1 bit, and the other PDF file to represent a single 0 bit. This effectively leaks one bit of information from the internet in a non-reproducible manner.

evilDownloadUrl combines many of these 1-bit-leaking fixed-output derivations in order to download the entire specified file from the internet.

The next section is an introduction to Nix for a non-Nixer (or anyone that needs a refresher), focusing on the concepts needed to explain how evilDownloadUrl works. The section after is a technical explanation of how evilDownloadUrl works.

Intro to Nix concepts for the non-Nixer

This section introduces the Nix concepts required for understanding evil-nix. It does this mostly by drawing comparisons to other build tools, including Docker. These will be rough comparisons, intending to give you an idea about what is going on without having to dive head-first into the inner-workings of Nix.

While these explanations are intended to give you some idea of what is going on, they may not be 100% completely technically accurate. If you're a long-time Nix user, you're recommended to just jump directly to the technical explanation in the following section.

The Nix ecosystem is comprised of quite a few different things:

  • Nix is a build tool and system daemon, somewhat similar to docker build and dockerd.

  • Nix is also a programming language, roughly comparable to the language used to write Dockerfiles (although Nix is more powerful and composable)

  • There is a large set of packages defined using the Nix language, called Nixpkgs. Nixpkgs is somewhat similar to the Debian or Arch Linux package sets. Because of Nix's programability and composability, Nixpkgs feels much more flexible than other Linux distro's package sets.

  • There is a Linux distribution called NixOS, which uses the Nix programming language to define system settings (for example, the contents of files in /etc), and uses packages from Nixpkgs. NixOS feels like a cross between a normal Linux distribution and a tool like Ansible/Puppet/Chef.

In order to understand evil-nix, we only need to look at Nix the-programming-language and Nix the-build-tool.

The Nix programming language has a concept of a derivation. A derivation can be thought of as a recipe to build a software package. It is roughly similar to a Dockerfile. Let's look at a simple derivation:

stdenv.mkDerivation {
  name = "hello-2.12.1";

  src = ./.;

  nativeBuildInputs = [ gcc make ];
}

This is a derivation to build the GNU Hello program. It declares its name and version (name = "hello-2.12.1"), and takes the input source code from the current directory (src = ./.). It declares two needed build tools, gcc and make.

You may be wondering why there is no code explicitly running ./configure && make && make install. The mkDerivation function has internal support for checking if there is an Automake build system, and automatically runs these commands for us. Pretty convenient! Nix of course allows you to specify any arbitrary build commands (similar to a Dockerfile), but in this case it is not needed.

If this derivation is saved to a file in the current directory called hello.nix (and the current directory also contains the source code for the GNU Hello package), you should be able to build this derivation with a command like the following:

$ nix-build ./hello.nix

This ./hello.nix file is not a real derivation, and you can't save it to disk and run it as-is. It has been modified to be easier to understand for people new to Nix.

If you're interesting in writing your first real Nix derivation, checkout one of the following tutorials:

  1. Your First Derivation
  2. Hacking Your First Package
  3. My first Nix derivation

This nix-build tool passes off the derivation to a system daemon. The system daemon starts up a sandbox using Linux namespaces and cgroups, and pulls in all the declared build tools, system libraries, and source code. In our case, the only build tools that have been declared and available in the sandbox are gcc and make. The system daemon then runs the specified build steps in the sandbox environment (which in our case are ./configure && make && make install). After running a build, the derivation is responsible for outputting a file (or a directory containing multiple files). The output file is is known as the output of the derivation (or just the "output"). The output of a derivation is generally an ELF binary, HTML documentation, man pages, etc.

The sandbox is a key element here. The Nix system daemon sandbox is very similar to the Docker daemon sandbox. However, the Nix system daemon goes one step further. It doesn't even allow network access. Since network access is not allowed during builds, you can be reasonably sure that your derivation is 100% reproducible. Regardless of what computer you run it on, it should always succeed or fail the same way.

At this point, you may have the question, "Well, that's good and all, but if I don't have network access, how do I download the source code I need to build? I don't want to always have to keep the source code I want to build in my current directory!"

To solve this problem, Nix provides a special type of derivation, called a fixed-output derivation. Here's an example of a fixed-output derivation:

fetchurl {
    url = "https://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/hello/hello-2.12.1.tar.gz";
    sha256 = "sha256-jZkUKv2SV28wsM18tCqNxoCZmLxdYH2Idh9RLibH2yA=";
}

Fixed-output derivations are special in that they require the hash of the output of the derivation to be specified in advance (the sha256 = line above). In exchange for specifying the hash, the Nix system daemon sandbox allows access to the network. The above derivation is allowed to use curl to download the hello-2.12.1.tar.gz file, and set it as the output of this fixed-output derivation. This hello-2.12.1.tar.gz file must have the SHA256 hash sha256-jZkUKv2SV28wsM18tCqNxoCZmLxdYH2Idh9RLibH2yA=.

Since the output hash is known, we can expect full 100% reproducibility of this derivation. If the derivation doesn't produce an output that exactly matches the hash, then the Nix system daemon will get angry and fail the build.

Just like non-fixed-output derivations, fixed-output derivations allow you to specify any arbitrary build commands you want. The above fetchurl function is setup to use curl, but you could potentially write a similar function that internally uses wget instead. Or maybe a derivation that uses ftp to pull a file from an FTP server.

You can see that the above derivation uses a SHA256 hash. Nix supports a few different hash types, including SHA1. evil-nix exploits the fact that SHA1 has known hash collisions.

In practice, the Nix language makes it very easy to combine multiple derivations together. For instance, the following Nix code is a normal derivation for GNU Hello, where the source code for GNU Hello is taken as the output of a fixed-output derivation:

stdenv.mkDerivation {
  name = "hello-2.12.1";

  src = fetchurl {
    url = "https://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/hello/hello-2.12.1.tar.gz";
    sha256 = "sha256-jZkUKv2SV28wsM18tCqNxoCZmLxdYH2Idh9RLibH2yA=";
  };

  nativeBuildInputs = [ gcc make ];
}

This ability to programmatically and easily combine different derivations makes Nix quite useful! (As an aside, both the gcc and make build inputs are also just normal derivations, defined quite similarly to this GNU hello derivation).

With this knowledge of normal derivations, fixed-output derivations, and derivation outputs, you should be set to understand how evil-nix exploits fixed-output derivations.

Technical Explanation

The main trick in evilDownloadUrl is a fixed-output derivation that returns one bit of (non-hashed) data from the internet. This fixed-output derivation works by first preparing two different output files. Let's call these output files pdfA and pdfB.

These are special PDF files that have the same SHA1 hash. The hash of the fixed-output derivation is set to this SHA1 hash. This works because Nix still supports fixed-output derivations using SHA1 hashes (in the name of backwards compatibility).

This fixed-output derivation takes a URL and a bit index as input. It downloads the input URL using curl, and inspects the bit at the given input index of the file. If the bit is a 1, the fixed-output derivation sets pdfA as the output. If the bit is a 0, it sets pdfB as the output.

This is the critical trick. From an information-theoretic perspective, you would expect that a fixed-output derivation is not able to realistically produce any additional information that is not already accounted for in the hash of the output. However, by combining a fixed-output derivation and a hash function with known collisions, it is possible to sneak out a single bit of data by changing which PDF is output.

You can see what this fixed-output derivation looks like in the file nix/evil/downloadBitNum.nix. This derivation is referred to as downloadBitNum in the evil-nix codebase.

downloadBitNum is then wrapped with a simple (non-fixed-output) derivation that inspects the output of downloadBitNum. This simple derivation is referred to as fetchBit in the codebase.

fetchBit inspects the output of downloadBitNum and sees whether it matches pdfA or pdfB. If pdfA has been output, then fetchBit will create a single output file with the contents of an ASCII 1 character. If downloadBitNum has output pdfB, then fetchBit will create a single output file with the contents of an ASCII 0 character.

You can see what fetchBit looks like in the file nix/evil/fetchBit.nix.

fetchBit is then repeated 8 times, and the subsequent outputs combined to form a full byte of the input URL. This is done in the function fetchByte, which is defined in nix/evil/fetchByte.nix.

fetchByte is then repeated for each byte of the input file. This is done in the function fetchBytes, which is defined in nix/evil/fetchBytes.nix.

fetchBytes outputs the full file we wanted to download from the input URL.

By utilizing fixed-output derivations with SHA1 collisions, we're able to download all the individual bits of the input URL, and carefully reassemble them to form the full file.

Use Cases

Due to the extreme inefficiency of evilDownloadUrl, the main use-case is not for Nix users, but actually for non-Nix users.

If you work in IT, I'm sure you have at least one coworker who is waaaaaaaaaay too into Nix. They likely bring up Nix in every conversation about your project's build system, CI, packaging, deployment, etc. You've probably heard them say the word "hermetic" at least 5 times in the last week.

The main use-case of evil-nix is for you. Next time you hear your coworker start to bring up Nix, hit them with "Eh, I heard Nix isn't that great. You can trivially download unhashed files. Talk about lack of reproducibility, haha"

Your coworker will likely start sputtering about sandboxes, unsafe hash functions, build purity, composability, etc. However, you can safely ignore them, and rest assured in your current build system's mishmash of Makefiles, Bash scripts, YAML files, and containers.

If your coworker still won't take the hint, suggest to them that they should learn a real build tool, like Docker.

FAQ

Does evil-nix pose a security-related problem to the Nix ecosystem?

No.

evil-nix gives you a way to write derivations that are potentially less reproducible, even in pure-eval mode (where you would expect that all downloaded files must be hashed).

However, reproducibility of Nix builds can be thwarted in many other ways than just evil-nix, so the techniques from evil-nix are not something to worry about in practice.

(You should, of course, be careful with evaluating any untrusted Nix code from the internet. You should be very careful with building any untrusted Nix derivations from the internet. And you should be extremely careful with running any untrusted binaries from the internet.)

Does this work with MD5 hashes instead of SHA1 hashes?

Yes.

Nix currently supports many different hash types for fixed-output derivations, including insecure hash functions like MD5 and SHA1.

The technique used by evil-nix relies on SHA1 collisions, but MD5 collisions could be used instead.

Does evilDownloadUrl require import from derivation (IFD)?

No.

evilDownloadUrl does currently makes use of IFD in order to read the length of the file in bytes before downloading. However, it would be trivial to have evilDownloadUrl also take the file length as an input.

The end-user would have to specify the file length they want to download, but then evilDownloadUrl could work with the --no-allow-import-from-derivation option.

What is the difference between evilDownloadUrl and builtins.fetchTarball?

Nix provides a few built-in functions that enable you to download files from the internet without needing to specify a hash. One example is builtins.fetchTarball.

The difference between builtins.fetchTarball and evilDownloadUrl is that evilDownloadUrl works even in Nix's pure-eval mode. If you try to use builtins.fetchTarball in pure-eval mode without specifying a hash, Nix will give you an error message.

Could Nix be fixed to stop evilDownladUrl from working?

Yes.

If Nix removed support for MD5 and SHA1 hashes for fixed-output derivations, that would stop evilDownloadUrl from working. However, it appears that MD5 and SHA1 hashes are still supported in the name of backwards compatibility.

Here are two potential changes that could be made to Nix that would stop evilDownloadUrl from working, but wouldn't completely break backwards compatibility:

  • Disallow MD5 and SHA1 hashes for fixed-output derivations in pure-eval mode.

    If someone wanted to use a new version of Nix to evaluate old Nix code that contained MD5 or SHA1 hashes, they would have to turn off pure-eval mode. This seems like it could be a reasonable trade-off, especially since pure-eval mode is a relatively recent addition to Nix.

  • Completely disable MD5 and SHA1 support by default, and hide functionality behind a config option.

    If someone wanted to use a new version of Nix to evaluate old Nix code that contained MD5 of SHA1 hashes, they would have to explicitly turn on the option that enables support for these weaker hash functions.

In practice, no recent Nix code uses MD5 or SHA1 hashes. I don't think I've ever seen an MD5 or SHA1 hash in Nix code in the wild, at least in the last 5 years or so.

Can evildDownloadUrl return different data every time it is called with the same URL?

Imagine you have a URL like http://example.com/random that returns a random number everytime it is called:

$ curl http://example.com/random
16
$ curl http://example.com/random
42

Is it possible have evilDownloadUrl also return a completely random number everytime it is called with this same URL?

Sort of.

If you run a command like the following, evilDownloadUrl will return the contents of the URL, and all the build artifacts will be cached to the Nix store:

$ nix-build --argstr url "http://example.com/random"
$ cat ./result
16

If you have a friend run the same command on their computer, they will get a different output (like 42).

However, if you build it again on your own machine, since all the build outputs are already in the Nix store, you will get the same output as previously:

$ nix-build --argstr url "http://example.com/random"
$ cat ./result
16

One way to work around this is to collect the garbage in your Nix store, and re-run the build:

$ rm ./result
$ nix-collect-garbage
$ nix-build --argstr url "http://example.com/random"
$ cat ./result
77

Alternatively, you could modify evilDownloadUrl to take an additional argument that allows you to "bust" the cache:

$ rm ./result
$ nix-collect-garbage
$ nix-build --argstr url "http://example.com/random" --argstr cache-buster foo
$ cat ./result
48
$ nix-build --argstr url "http://example.com/random" --argstr cache-buster bar
$ cat ./result
3

This cache-busting value would need to be supplied by the end user.

Acknowledgements

As far as I can tell, @aszlig came up with the idea of using fixed-output derivations with hash collisions in order to impurely check whether or not given URLs can be downloaded. The first implementation was in this commit.

evil-nix generalizes this technique to allow downloading arbitrary bits of files from the internet. It then generalizes the approach even more to allow downloading full files from the internet, without needing to specify the hash of the file.

Thanks to @sternenseemann for originally linking me to the above commit, and suggesting it as a potential approach to this issue.