Webpack version 4.44.0, released on July 24, 2020, represents a minor update over its predecessor, version 4.43.0, which was released on April 21, 2020. While the core functionality of webpack as a powerful module bundler remains consistent, a closer examination reveals subtle yet potentially impactful differences for developers.
Notably, within the dependencies, watchpack has been updated from version 1.6.1 to 1.7.4 and enhanced-resolve from 4.1.0 to 4.3.0. These updates likely include bug fixes, performance enhancements, and potentially new features within the respective packages that webpack leverages. watchpack improvements may translate to faster and more reliable file watching during development, while enhanced-resolve could bring more efficient module resolution. There's also a minor increase unpackedSize of the package, which could be due to improvements in the core functionality or new features.
Developers considering upgrading from 4.43.0 to 4.44.0 should evaluate the specific changes within watchpack and enhanced-resolve to determine if the update addresses any existing issues or provides desirable benefits in their workflow. While the changes may appear incremental, these dependency updates can contribute to a more stable and optimized development experience when bundling JavaScript applications with Webpack. Always review changelogs for these dependencies to understand the full scope of the updates.
All the vulnerabilities related to the version 4.44.0 of the package
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.
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.
