Babel Preset Env, a powerful tool for modern JavaScript development, saw an update from version 1.5.2 to 1.6.0, offering enhancements to its core functionality. Both versions share a common goal: to intelligently transform your code based on target environments, using browserslist configurations. This eliminates the need to manually manage individual Babel plugins, streamlining the build process. Developers leveraging these versions benefit from automatically included transformations for modern JavaScript features, ensuring compatibility across a wide range of browsers and Node.js versions.
The key distinction between the two releases lies primarily in the updated dependencies. Version 1.6.0 reflects a general update and stabilization around the babel ecosystem. The diff between the 2 versions does not reflect core functionalities as the largest changes were in the compat-table dependency and a refresh of dependencies.
For developers considering which version to use, version 1.6.0 contains the freshest set of updates around babel as a whole. Staying up-to-date prevents incompatibilities with other packages when working with babel. This is important for maintaining dependency stability in your projects and for utilizing the latest features and ensuring the most robust and compatible transpilation process for modern JavaScript code.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 1.6.0 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