Moment.js saw a minor version bump from 2.20.0 to 2.20.1, signifying a patch release focused on bug fixes and minor improvements rather than significant new features. Both versions maintain the core functionality of parsing, validating, manipulating, and displaying dates and times in JavaScript, a crucial task for many web and Node.js applications. Developers relying on Moment.js for date handling can expect consistent performance in these core areas between the two versions.
A key difference lies in the releaseDate; version 2.20.1 was released on December 19, 2017, while 2.20.0 was released just two days prior on December 17, 2017. This short interval suggests that version 2.20.1 likely addresses issues discovered immediately following the 2.20.0 release. While the devDependencies remain identical, including testing frameworks like karma, qunit, and build tools like grunt and rollup, the newer version is recommended for its stability enhancements over its predecessor. Developers should always prioritize the latest patch releases to benefit from bug fixes and stay up-to-date with the most reliable codebase, ensuring smoother date and time operations within their applications. Both versions also share the same MIT license, and the same author, Iskren Ivov Chernev.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 2.20.1 of the package
Path Traversal: 'dir/../../filename' in moment.locale
This vulnerability impacts npm (server) users of moment.js, especially if user provided locale string, eg fr is directly used to switch moment locale.
This problem is patched in 2.29.2, and the patch can be applied to all affected versions (from 1.0.1 up until 2.29.1, inclusive).
Sanitize user-provided locale name before passing it to moment.js.
Are there any links users can visit to find out more?
If you have any questions or comments about this advisory:
Moment.js vulnerable to Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity
The problem is patched in 2.29.4, the patch can be applied to all affected versions with minimal tweaking.
In general, given the proliferation of ReDoS attacks, it makes sense to limit the length of the user input to something sane, like 200 characters or less. I haven't seen legitimate cases of date-time strings longer than that, so all moment users who do pass a user-originating string to constructor are encouraged to apply such a rudimentary filter, that would help with this but also most future ReDoS vulnerabilities.
There is an excellent writeup of the issue here: https://github.com/moment/moment/pull/6015#issuecomment-1152961973=
The issue is rooted in the code that removes legacy comments (stuff inside parenthesis) from strings during rfc2822 parsing. moment("(".repeat(500000)) will take a few minutes to process, which is unacceptable.
