@babel/runtime versions 7.17.9 and 7.17.8 offer Babel's modular runtime helpers, essential for projects leveraging Babel to transpile modern JavaScript code for compatibility with older environments. Both versions share the same core functionality, described as providing modular runtime helpers for Babel, the popular JavaScript transpiler. They are both licensed under the MIT license, ensuring broad usability and modification rights.
A key dependency for both releases remains consistent, relying on regenerator-runtime version ^0.13.4 for functionalities related to generators and async/await transformations. Examining the dist section gives more clues. Both versions seemingly share the same fileCount of 191 and unpackedSize of 172598 bytes, which suggests that the changes between these two versions were relatively minor. The most notable difference between these two releases lies in their release dates. Version 7.17.9 was published on April 6th, 2022 whereas version 7.17.8 was published on March 18th, 2022.
Developers should choose the latest version (7.17.9) to benefit from any bug fixes, performance improvements, or security patches included since the 7.17.8 release. The Babel team consistently updates these runtime helpers, and keeping up-to-date ensures smoother transpilation and improved runtime behavior in targeted environments. Always check Babel's official changelog for detailed information on included changes.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 7.17.9 of the package
Babel has inefficient RegExp complexity in generated code with .replace when transpiling named capturing groups
When using Babel to compile regular expression named capturing groups, Babel will generate a polyfill for the .replace method that has quadratic complexity on some specific replacement pattern strings (i.e. the second argument passed to .replace).
Your generated code is vulnerable if all the following conditions are true:
.replace method on a regular expression that contains named capturing groups.replaceIf you are using @babel/preset-env with the targets option, the transform that injects the vulnerable code is automatically enabled if:
You can verify what transforms @babel/preset-env is using by enabling the debug option.
This problem has been fixed in @babel/helpers and @babel/runtime 7.26.10 and 8.0.0-alpha.17, please upgrade. It's likely that you do not directly depend on @babel/helpers, and instead you depend on @babel/core (which itself depends on @babel/helpers). Upgrading to @babel/core 7.26.10 is not required, but it guarantees that you are on a new enough @babel/helpers version.
Please note that just updating your Babel dependencies is not enough: you will also need to re-compile your code.
If you are passing user-provided strings as the second argument of .replace on regular expressions that contain named capturing groups, validate the input and make sure it does not contain the substring $< if it's then not followed by > (possibly with other characters in between).
This vulnerability was reported and fixed in https://github.com/babel/babel/pull/17173.