Watchpack is a utility designed for efficient directory and file watching, commonly used within tools like Webpack. Comparing version 1.6.1 with its predecessor, 1.6.0, reveals subtle but potentially important changes for developers relying on this library. The key difference lies in the updated dependency on chokidar, a core component responsible for the actual file system watching. Version 1.6.1 upgrades this dependency to ^2.1.8 from ^2.0.2 in the previous release. This chokidar update likely incorporates bug fixes, performance improvements, and possibly new features related to file system event handling across different operating systems. Developers benefit from a more robust and reliable file watching experience, potentially resolving issues with inaccurate or missed file change detections that could impact build processes. The releaseDate indicates that version 1.6.1 was released significantly later, incorporating fixes and improvements accumulated over a nearly two-year period that span from April 2018 to March 2020. Finally, while both versions have the same number of fileCount in the dist object, the unpackedSize is slightly different. Version 1.6.0 is slightly bigger than the newer version, suggesting some cleanup or optimization efforts. This means that the newer version is negligibly smaller on disk.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 1.6.1 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.
