Webpack version 1.9.4 arrived hot on the heels of 1.9.3, both released on the same day, May 10th, 2015. Examining their package metadata reveals minimal functional differences that would directly impact developers. Both versions share an identical core feature set, providing robust module bundling capabilities for CommonJS/AMD modules. They offer the same array of loaders that can preprocess diverse file types such as JSON, Jade, CoffeeScript, CSS, and Less. Both rely on the same underlying dependency versions for critical packages like async, clone, esprima, and uglify-js. Development dependencies, used for building, testing, and linting the webpack codebase itself, are also mirror images. Even the peer dependency, node-libs-browser, remains the same, indicating compatibility in the targeted browser environment. The really interesting thing is that the only difference is the releaseDate, with 1.9.4 being released about 2 hours after the 1.9.3. This would suggest only a very small bug or documentation update that could be interesting only for very specific edge cases. It is unlikely that upgrading from 1.9.3 to 1.9.4 would fix any problems or enable new features. If somebody is using an older version of webpack from the same release line there might be some cumulative improvements.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 1.9.4 of the package
Regular Expression Denial of Service in uglify-js
Versions of uglify-js prior to 2.6.0 are affected by a regular expression denial of service vulnerability when malicious inputs are passed into the parse() method.
var u = require('uglify-js');
var genstr = function (len, chr) {
var result = "";
for (i=0; i<=len; i++) {
result = result + chr;
}
return result;
}
u.parse("var a = " + genstr(process.argv[2], "1") + ".1ee7;");
$ time node test.js 10000
real 0m1.091s
user 0m1.047s
sys 0m0.039s
$ time node test.js 80000
real 0m6.486s
user 0m6.229s
sys 0m0.094s
Update to version 2.6.0 or later.
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.
Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in braces
A vulnerability was found in Braces versions prior to 2.3.1. Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) attacks.
Regular Expression Denial of Service in braces
Versions of braces prior to 2.3.1 are vulnerable to Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS). Untrusted input may cause catastrophic backtracking while matching regular expressions. This can cause the application to be unresponsive leading to Denial of Service.
Upgrade to version 2.3.1 or higher.
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.