Sass version 1.6.2 is a minor update to the popular pure JavaScript implementation of Sass, building upon the foundation laid by version 1.6.1. Both versions share the same core features, offering developers a reliable way to leverage the power of Sass within their JavaScript environments. Critically, both specify the same dependency, chokidar, for file watching capabilities, indicating a continuity in how Sass handles file system monitoring for efficient development workflows. They are both under the MIT license, well documented in GitHub repositories and had Natalie Weizenbaum as the author.
However, a subtle but important difference exists between the two. While both versions maintain identical dependencies, descriptions, licensing, source repositories, and authors, the unpacked size of version 1.6.2 is slightly larger, registering at 646307 bytes compared to version 1.6.1's 646298 bytes. This 9 bytes difference, while seemingly negligible, suggests underlying code modifications, potentially bug fixes, performance tweaks, or minor feature enhancements. Similarly, the release dates mark a small amount of work that caused the newer release to occour 5 days after the other.
For developers considering upgrading from 1.6.1 to 1.6.2, the upgrade should be straightforward. The shared dependency on chokidar ensures no conflicts arise from that quarter. While the release is a minor patch, the slight size increase implies improvements, potentially impacting performance or stability. To use the package, one can use the URL https://registry.npmjs.org/sass/-/sass-1.6.2.tgz to download the zipped file with a package manager such as npm.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 1.6.2 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.
