Babel plugin transform async to generator, a crucial tool for developers targeting older JavaScript environments, saw a notable update between versions 6.8.0 and 6.16.0. Both versions share the core functionality of converting async functions into ES2015 generators, ensuring compatibility with JavaScript runtimes that lack native async/await support. They also depend on the babel-plugin-syntax-async-functions package to enable the parsing of async/await syntax. One area of consistency is the usage of babel-runtime for polyfilling, ensuring that the generated code runs smoothly across different environments.
The key difference lies in the dependency on babel-helper-remap-async-to-generator. Version 6.8.0 relies on babel-helper-remap-async-to-generator version 6.8.0, while version 6.16.0 moves up to babel-helper-remap-async-to-generator version 6.16.0. This suggests improvements or bug fixes within the helper function responsible for the core transformation logic. For javascript developers, upgrading from 6.8.0 to 6.16.0 enables them to leverage these enhancements, potentially leading to more efficient or reliable async-to-generator transformations. However, the core function of making more modern code work with older systems remains consistent across both versions.
The later version was released on "2016-09-28T19:38:54.206Z" compared to "2016-05-02T23:44:29.034Z" for the older one.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 6.16.0 of the package
Babel vulnerable to arbitrary code execution when compiling specifically crafted malicious code
Using Babel to compile code that was specifically crafted by an attacker can lead to arbitrary code execution during compilation, when using plugins that rely on the path.evaluate()or path.evaluateTruthy() internal Babel methods.
Known affected plugins are:
@babel/plugin-transform-runtime@babel/preset-env when using its useBuiltIns option@babel/helper-define-polyfill-provider, such as babel-plugin-polyfill-corejs3, babel-plugin-polyfill-corejs2, babel-plugin-polyfill-es-shims, babel-plugin-polyfill-regeneratorNo other plugins under the @babel/ namespace are impacted, but third-party plugins might be.
Users that only compile trusted code are not impacted.
The vulnerability has been fixed in @babel/traverse@7.23.2.
Babel 6 does not receive security fixes anymore (see Babel's security policy), hence there is no patch planned for babel-traverse@6.
@babel/traverse to v7.23.2 or higher. You can do this by deleting it from your package manager's lockfile and re-installing the dependencies. @babel/core >=7.23.2 will automatically pull in a non-vulnerable version.@babel/traverse and are using one of the affected packages mentioned above, upgrade them to their latest version to avoid triggering the vulnerable code path in affected @babel/traverse versions:
@babel/plugin-transform-runtime v7.23.2@babel/preset-env v7.23.2@babel/helper-define-polyfill-provider v0.4.3babel-plugin-polyfill-corejs2 v0.4.6babel-plugin-polyfill-corejs3 v0.8.5babel-plugin-polyfill-es-shims v0.10.0babel-plugin-polyfill-regenerator v0.5.3