Babel Preset React App version 10.0.0 represents a significant update over its predecessor, version 9.1.2, offering developers the latest Babel transformations and syntax support for React development. The most notable difference lies in the updated dependencies. Version 10.0.0 upgrades core Babel packages like @babel/core, @babel/runtime, @babel/preset-env, @babel/preset-react, @babel/preset-typescript, and @babel/plugin-transform-runtime to version 7.12.x, a substantial leap from the 7.9.x series used in version 9.1.2. This upgrade brings performance improvements, bug fixes, and support for newer JavaScript and TypeScript features, ensuring compatibility with the latest React syntax and best practices.
Furthermore, version 10.0.0 also updates several Babel plugins related to proposal features like decorators, class properties, numeric separators, optional chaining and nullish coalescing operator to 7.12.1. In contrast, version 9.1.2 uses older versions such as 7.8.3. These updates ensure that developers can seamlessly utilize these modern language features within their React applications. The releaseDate also indicates the newness of the major release, with the 10.0.0 update providing over 6 months of more support and fixes than the older release.
For developers using Create React App or configuring their own Babel setup for React projects, upgrading to babel-preset-react-app 10.0.0 is recommended to benefit from the latest features, performance enhancements, and bug fixes provided by the underlying Babel ecosystem. This upgrade ensures your project stays current with modern JavaScript and React development practices.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 10.0.0 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.