Hola people!!! 🥑 It’s been a while since I have written a blog and now since most of us are working from home, the time that used to go in commute is now saved and I thought why not utilize this time and write about my recent experience of fixing a security vulnerability. So if any of you in the recent time have seen something like this image below and have no clue how to fix it then this article is for you. When I saw it, I had no clue either but with some research I could fix this. 🔬 Problem: So what this means is one of the dependencies in your has some security implications which can be exploited by an attacker and can cause problems for you, your product or the company you work for. package.json For example: https://snyk.io/vuln/npm:eslint:20180222 This vulnerability could have caused a Regular Expression Denial of Service 💡 Finding: In order to find potential vulnerabilities in your repo, you can either do 1) npm audit — which should show you an output like the following image: 2) Github security policy can also notify you — something like the following image: Today when I started working I had to deal with this error where and were being reported as security vulnerabilities. acorn minimist 🎉 Solution Solution to this problem is in steps:- 📦 npm update 1) This is the first thing you should do and it's the simplest one too. Run npm update — https://docs.npmjs.com/cli-commands/update.html Delete your package-lock.json file or for yarn users, delete your yarn.lock file. In an ideal world this would work, but there might be some dependency which does not follow semver and might get updated too. So a better solution here would be to only delete the lines corresponding to the vulnerable package in your package-lock.json(or yarn.lock) file. Run npm install again In an ideal scenario, this should have upgraded your dependencies to the next semver version and those libraries might have already fixed the version of there transitive dependencies. 🔭 npm audit 2) But if that did not fix your issue, which for did not fix for me, then follow the below mentioned steps: minimist 2.1) To fix any dependency, you need to first know which npm package depends on that. npm audit This will tell you the packages which are vulnerable. This tells me that is required by and that is required by minimist mkdirp mocha. A quick glance into package-lock.json can give you more information around the affected version. In my case mocha(7.1.0) -> mkdirp(0.5.1) -> minimist(0.0.8) — the vulnerable version. 🔑 Resolutions key 3) And finally the fix was: 3.1) First npm install the non-vulnerable version, which in my case was 1.2.5 npm install minimist --save-dev For and users yarn npm 3.2) Add a resolutions key in your package.json file { : { : }
} "resolutions" "minimist" "^1.2.5" For npm users, we need one more step for that resolutions key to work. 3.3) Use npm-force-resolutions ( ) https://www.npmjs.com/package/npm-force-resolutions : { : } "scripts" "preinstall" "npx npm-force-resolutions" 3.4) After that run npm install That’s it. That solves the dependency issues which can not be updated using either npm update or by uninstalling and reinstalling a new dependency. To check if the dependency works correctly npm ls minimist This should give you an output like the image below 🔥 Disclaimer If some packages are only compatible with an older version, then this change might break your app. So be careful while resolving to a particular version and test your app before releasing this change. 👯 Share this article if you found it helpful! You can follow me on twitter for more updates. @VivekNayyar09 Also please don’t forget to maintain social distance to prevent the virus from spreading and wash your hands regularly. Stay safe and stay at home. Previously published at https://dev.to/viveknayyar/fixing-security-vulnerabilities-in-npm-dependencies-in-less-than-3-mins-2p5g

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