@babel/runtime offers modular runtime helpers for Babel, streamlining project setup. Comparing versions 7.5.1 and 7.5.0 reveals subtle yet important distinctions for developers. Both versions share the same count of files (146) and unpacked size (87509), suggesting that the core functionality and footprint remain largely unchanged. Crucially, version 7.5.1 depends on the same version of regenerator-runtime ("^0.13.2").
The primary difference resides in the "devDependencies". Version 7.5.1 depends on "@babel/helpers":"^7.5.1", while version 7.5.0 depends on "@babel/helpers":"^7.5.0". This indicates that the changes likely involve updates or fixes within Babel's internal helper functions, impacting the compilation and transformation processes carried out by Babel. This implies developers might experience slight differences in output code from their projects after upgrading.
The release dates also shed light on the timeline. Version 7.5.0 was released on 2019-07-04, and version 7.5.1 was quickly released on 2019-07-06. The quick turnaround suggests that 7.5.1 may contain bug fixes or minor improvements related to helper functions introduced in 7.5.0, warranting developers to upgrade to the newer 7.5.1 version for the latest compilation improvements and bug fixes.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 7.5.1 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.