Webpack version 1.9.6 arrived shortly after 1.9.5, released just three days apart in May 2015. Both versions serve the core purpose of bundling JavaScript modules for the browser and are extremely similar. Examining their metadata, the key difference surfaces in their releaseDate, indicating that 1.9.6 represents a patch or minor update to 1.9.5.
Developers considering these older versions will find core functionalities focused on modular JavaScript development, with features for code splitting, on-demand loading, and support for various loaders to preprocess file types like JSON, Jade, CoffeeScript, CSS, and Less. This allows for a streamlined workflow in transforming diverse assets into browser-compatible bundles.
The defined dependencies, including async, clone, and uglify-js, provide the libraries needed for asynchronous operations, object cloning, and code minification. Peer dependencies specify compatibility with node-libs-browser, ensuring that the webpack version functions correctly with browserifying Node.js modules.
The development dependency section highlights tools used in the webpack project's own build and test process. These include mocha for testing, eslint for code linting and style checking, express for local demo server and istanbul for code coverage.
Given the close release dates, developers can likely assume that 1.9.6 addresses bug fixes or minor enhancements found in 1.9.5. When choosing between the two, selecting the newer 1.9.6 is generally advisable, as it likely incorporates improvements and potentially resolves issues identified in the preceding version. However, remember, that these versions are superseeded since long time.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 1.9.6 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.