Version 7.7.7 of @babel/cli introduces several key updates for developers using Babel's command-line interface, building upon the foundation established in version 7.7.5. Both versions share core dependencies like glob, slash, lodash, chokidar, make-dir, commander, source-map, convert-source-map, and fs-readdir-recursive, ensuring consistent functionality for file system operations, command-line argument parsing, and source map handling. The licensing remains MIT. and the repository remains the same.
A notable difference lies within the devDependencies. Version 7.7.7 upgrades @babel/core from ^7.7.5 to ^7.7.7, suggesting potential improvements or bug fixes within the core Babel transformation engine itself that cli package consumes. While @babel/helper-fixtures remains at ^7.6.3, the core update implies enhanced compatibility or performance gains when transpiling code with the latest Babel features. The peer dependency on @babel/core remains ^7.0.0-0 for both versions, indicating broad compatibility with Babel 7. Furthermore the file size has changed during the build from 35024 to 35048, maybe due to the core update.
Developers considering an upgrade from 7.7.5 to 7.7.7 should primarily evaluate the impact of the @babel/core update. Review the changelog for @babel/core@7.7.7 to understand the specific changes, bug fixes, and potential breaking changes relevant to their Babel configuration and project. The releaseDate also indicates a two week gap, from 2019-12-06 to 2019-12-19.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 7.7.7 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.
