Sass version 1.13.1 is a minor patch release over the preceding stable version 1.13.0, both being pure JavaScript implementations of the popular Sass stylesheet language. For developers using the sass package, the key difference lies in the details, as the core functionality and dependencies remain largely the same. Both versions rely on chokidar for file watching capabilities, essential for automatic recompilation during development workflows. They are released under the permissive MIT license and the code is managed on GitHub.
A primary point of interest for developers is the release date disparity, with version 1.13.1 released approximately two weeks after 1.13.0 (September 1, 2018, vs. August 17, 2018). This suggests that version 1.13.1 likely addresses bug fixes or minor improvements discovered in version 1.13.0. Another small difference can be observed in the unpacked size of the packages, where the newer version is slightly smaller.
While the changes might seem small, developers should always prioritize using the latest stable patch version (1.13.1 in this case) to benefit from the latest bug fixes and optimizations. Investigating the specific changelog or commit history between these versions would provide finer-grained details about the resolved issues. Overall, this incremental update underlines the ongoing maintenance and refinement of the Sass library, insuring a more stable experience for developers.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 1.13.1 of the package
Uncontrolled resource consumption in braces
The NPM package braces fails to limit the number of characters it can handle, which could lead to Memory Exhaustion. In lib/parse.js, if a malicious user sends "imbalanced braces" as input, the parsing will enter a loop, which will cause the program to start allocating heap memory without freeing it at any moment of the loop. Eventually, the JavaScript heap limit is reached, and the program will crash.
Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in micromatch
The NPM package micromatch prior to version 4.0.8 is vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). The vulnerability occurs in micromatch.braces() in index.js because the pattern .* will greedily match anything. By passing a malicious payload, the pattern matching will keep backtracking to the input while it doesn't find the closing bracket. As the input size increases, the consumption time will also increase until it causes the application to hang or slow down. There was a merged fix but further testing shows the issue persisted prior to https://github.com/micromatch/micromatch/pull/266. This issue should be mitigated by using a safe pattern that won't start backtracking the regular expression due to greedy matching.
