Sass version 1.7.1 represents a minor update to the popular CSS preprocessor, building upon the solid foundation laid by version 1.7.0. Both versions offer developers a pure JavaScript implementation of Sass, ensuring cross-platform compatibility and ease of integration into various JavaScript-based workflows. A key dependency shared by both releases is Chokidar, responsible for robust file system watching, which is crucial for automatically recompiling Sass files upon changes. This streamlines the development process, allowing developers to focus on writing code rather than manually triggering compilation.
While the core functionality remains consistent, a noticeable difference lies in the unpacked size. Version 1.7.1 boasts a slightly smaller footprint at 647095 bytes compared to 1.7.0's 687516 bytes. This potentially indicates minor optimizations and refinements within the codebase, although the functional impact may be negligible for most users. The release date also highlights the recency of version 1.7.1, being released just a few days after 1.7.0. For developers, choosing between these versions would largely depend on their dependency management strategy. The newer version (1.7.1) is generally recommended for its potential improvements and bug fixes, although a review of the changelog is always advised for project specific compatibility. Both are licensed under the permissive MIT license and are maintained on Github.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 1.7.1 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.
