Sass version 1.17.0 represents an incremental update over its predecessor, 1.16.1, both iterations maintain the core functionality as a pure JavaScript implementation of the popular Sass stylesheet language. Developers leveraging Sass for their web development projects will find the upgrade offers subtle yet potentially impactful improvements. The dependency on chokidar remains consistent across both versions (at ^2.0.0), indicating no fundamental changes in how file watching is handled, a crucial feature for automatic Sass compilation during development.
A notable difference lies in the unpackedSize within the dist object. Version 1.17.0 has an unpacked size of 683953 bytes, slightly larger than the 672582 bytes of version 1.16.1. This increase, while not substantial, suggests internal changes, potentially bug fixes, performance enhancements, or new, albeit small, feature additions. Developers should consider this size difference if bundle size is a significant concern, though the impact is likely minimal.
The releaseDate also pinpoints the recency of each version, with 1.17.0 released on February 4, 2019, after 1.16.1 which was released on January 17, 2019. This difference can be an indicator of how actively the library is maintained. By upgrading to the newer version, developers can typically benefit from the latest bug fixes and optimizations made by the Sass team, although specific changelogs should always be consulted for detailed information about changes. Each version uses the same MIT License which is an open and free license meaning that users can include, modify and share the content freely,
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 1.17.0 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.
