@babel/cli version 7.5.0 offers incremental improvements over the previous stable release, 7.4.4, making it a valuable upgrade for developers using Babel's command-line interface. One key difference lies in the updated dependencies. Version 7.5.0 now depends on "@babel/core": "^7.5.0" while 7.4.4 depends on "@babel/core":"^7.4.4" as a development dependency, ensuring compatibility with the latest Babel core functionalities and bug fixes. While most other dependencies remain largely consistent between the two versions such as "glob", "slash", "lodash", "mkdirp", it's important to note that these underlying libraries also receive their own updates and maintenance, implicitly benefiting @babel/cli users. The optional dependency "chokidar" remains the same suggesting no specific modifications were done that depends on it. Both versions maintain the same peer dependency requirement of "@babel/core": "^7.0.0-0", ensuring broad compatibility with existing Babel projects.
A notable change between the versions is the release dates. The newer version was published on "2019-07-04T12:57:52.438Z", indicating a more recent set of fixes and refinements compared to the older version published on "2019-04-26T21:03:41.037Z". Both versions share the same unpacked size and file count. For developers, upgrading to 7.5.0 brings the advantage of leveraging the latest enhancements within the wider Babel ecosystem, likely addressing bugs and potentially improving performance or introducing new features exposed through Babel core.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 7.5.0 of the package
Uncontrolled resource consumption in braces
The NPM package braces fails to limit the number of characters it can handle, which could lead to Memory Exhaustion. In lib/parse.js, if a malicious user sends "imbalanced braces" as input, the parsing will enter a loop, which will cause the program to start allocating heap memory without freeing it at any moment of the loop. Eventually, the JavaScript heap limit is reached, and the program will crash.
Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in micromatch
The NPM package micromatch prior to version 4.0.8 is vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). The vulnerability occurs in micromatch.braces() in index.js because the pattern .* will greedily match anything. By passing a malicious payload, the pattern matching will keep backtracking to the input while it doesn't find the closing bracket. As the input size increases, the consumption time will also increase until it causes the application to hang or slow down. There was a merged fix but further testing shows the issue persisted prior to https://github.com/micromatch/micromatch/pull/266. This issue should be mitigated by using a safe pattern that won't start backtracking the regular expression due to greedy matching.
