Babel CLI version 7.6.2 is a minor update to the popular command-line interface for the Babel JavaScript compiler, succeeding version 7.6.0. Both versions provide the essential tools for transpiling modern JavaScript code into a format compatible with older browsers and environments. A key difference lies in the updated development dependencies. Version 7.6.2 utilizes "@babel/core": "^7.6.2" and "@babel/helper-fixtures": "^7.6.2", while version 7.6.0 depends on "@babel/core": "^7.6.0" and "@babel/helper-fixtures": "^7.6.0". This signifies bug fixes, performance improvements or new functionalities within Babel's core compiler and testing utilities that would be utilized and available for developers using version 7.6.2.
Developers should consider upgrading to version 7.6.2 to benefit from the latest improvements and bug fixes within the Babel ecosystem. Both versions share the same core dependencies like glob, slash, lodash, mkdirp, chokidar, commander, source-map, output-file-sync, convert-source-map, and fs-readdir-recursive, ensuring feature parity in basic functionalities. The peerDependencies entry "@babel/core": "^7.0.0-0" remains consistent, emphasizing Babel CLI's compatibility with various Babel core versions within the 7.x range. Both are licenced under the MIT license. Finally the unpacked size of the newer version has increased 1195 bytes and the release date is later.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 7.6.2 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.
