Babel-preset-react-app is a crucial Babel preset designed for use with Create React App, streamlining the process of configuring Babel for React projects. Version 3.0.3, released on September 27, 2017, builds upon the foundation laid by version 3.0.2, released on August 9, 2017, offering developers a robust solution for modern JavaScript transformation. While both versions share identical dependencies, including babel-preset-env, babel-preset-react, and various babel-plugin-transform packages that handle JSX, runtime, and other syntax enhancements, a key distinction arises in their licensing. Version 3.0.3 adopts the MIT license, offering greater flexibility for developers in terms of usage and modification, whereas version 3.0.2 employed the BSD-3-Clause license.
For developers, this change represents a shift towards a more permissive licensing model. Integrating babel-preset-react-app into a project simplifies Babel configuration, pre-packaging essential plugins for optimal React development. These plugins handle tasks like JSX transformation, dynamic imports, and class properties, ensuring compatibility with different JavaScript environments. The peer dependency requirement for "babel-runtime" remains consistent, ensuring proper runtime support for transformed code. Choosing version 3.0.3 provides the same functionality as 3.0.2 with an added benefit of a widely accepted and flexible MIT license.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 3.0.3 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