Sass version 1.20.1 offers a subtle yet noteworthy update compared to its predecessor, version 1.19.0. Both versions maintain the core functionality as pure JavaScript implementations of Sass, a powerful CSS preprocessor, enabling developers to write more maintainable and efficient stylesheets. They share the same dependency on chokidar for file watching capabilities, ensuring that changes to your Sass files are automatically compiled into CSS. The licensing remains under the permissive MIT license, and the project is still hosted on GitHub under the sass/dart-sass repository, indicating continuity in the project's overall maintenance and development. Natalie Weizenbaum remains the listed author.
The key differences lie in the details. Version 1.20.1, released on May 3rd, 2019, has a slightly larger unpacked size of 676,648 bytes compared to version 1.19.0's 675,066 bytes, which was released on April 19th, 2019. While the difference in size is minimal, it suggests that the newer version contains some incremental improvements. Developers upgrading from 1.19.0 to 1.20.1 can expect a stable transition with potentially better performance or bug fixes. Due to the similar package size and shared dependencies it is possible that the new version contains edge case fixes. Overall, 1.20.1 represents a refined iteration of the already robust 1.19.0, continuing to empower developers with a reliable Sass compilation tool.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 1.20.1 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.
