Serve-static is a widely used npm package for serving static files in Node.js applications, commonly within Express.js frameworks. Examining versions 1.13.1 and 1.13.2 reveals subtle but potentially important changes for developers. The core functionality of serving static content remains consistent, ensuring backwards compatibility for most use cases.
The primary difference lies in the updated dependencies. Version 1.13.2 upgrades the send dependency from 0.16.1 to 0.16.2 and encodeurl from 1.0.1 to ~1.0.2. While these appear to be minor version bumps, they often contain crucial bug fixes and security patches. Developers should always aim to use the latest versions of their dependencies to mitigate potential vulnerabilities in their web apps. The send package is responsible for efficiently sending files, so updating it could imply improvements in performance or handling edge cases like range requests or conditional GETs.
For development workflows, both versions utilize identical testing and linting tools. This includes mocha for unit testing, eslint with various plugins for code quality, and istanbul for code coverage. While the actual contents of tests don't change between the versions provided, these are used for ensuring a high quality. The update of tooling versions, like eslint-plugin-node (5.2.0 to 5.2.1), eslint-plugin-import (2.7.0 to 2.8.0), eslint-plugin-promise (3.5.0 to 3.6.0) could lead to stricter code checks and better identified potential issues. Developers should evaluate, if those new versions are worth the update, but in general it is a good idea to keep up with the latest versions. The dependency upgrades in serve-static ensures an up-to-date and stable environment for projects relying on static content delivery.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 1.13.2 of the package
serve-static vulnerable to template injection that can lead to XSS
passing untrusted user input - even after sanitizing it - to redirect() may execute untrusted code
this issue is patched in serve-static 1.16.0
users are encouraged to upgrade to the patched version of express, but otherwise can workaround this issue by making sure any untrusted inputs are safe, ideally by validating them against an explicit allowlist
successful exploitation of this vector requires the following:
send vulnerable to template injection that can lead to XSS
passing untrusted user input - even after sanitizing it - to SendStream.redirect() may execute untrusted code
this issue is patched in send 0.19.0
users are encouraged to upgrade to the patched version of express, but otherwise can workaround this issue by making sure any untrusted inputs are safe, ideally by validating them against an explicit allowlist
successful exploitation of this vector requires the following:
