Babel-jest is a crucial plugin for Jest, enabling developers to seamlessly use Babel to transform JavaScript code within their tests. This allows for the use of modern JavaScript syntax and features, even if the target environment doesn't natively support them. Examining versions 24.3.0 and 24.3.1, we see a minor patch update focused on refinement.
The key difference lies in the @jest/transform dependency. Version 24.3.0 relied on @jest/transform@24.3.0, while version 24.3.1 upgrades this to @jest/transform@24.3.1. This seemingly small change likely incorporates bug fixes, performance improvements, or enhancements within Jest's transformation pipeline. Developers should favour the newer 24.3.1 for its stability.
Both versions share identical core dependencies, including chalk for colorful console output, slash for cross-platform path handling, @jest/types for type definitions, babel-preset-jest for default Babel presets optimized for Jest, @types/babel__core for Babel's core type definitions, and babel-plugin-istanbul for code coverage instrumentation. Development dependencies remain consistent, ensuring compatibility with @babel/core and type definitions for slash. The peer dependency on @babel/core also remains unchanged, mandating a compatible Babel core version for proper functionality. Crucially, both are MIT licensed, open source, and have the same file count, unpacked size and repository. The release date shows that 24.3.1 came out the same day, hours later than 24.3.0, likely indicating an immediate fix for an issue in the earlier revision of the package.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 24.3.1 of the package
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.
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.
