@keystone-6/core's NODE_ENV defaults to development with esbuild
### Impact
`@keystone-6/core@3.0.0 || 3.0.1` users that use `NODE_ENV` in their own code (**not dependencies**) to trigger security-sensitive functionality in a production build are vulnerable to `NODE_ENV` being inlined to `"development"` for user code.
If your dependencies use `NODE_ENV` to trigger particular behaviours (optimisations, security or otherwise), they should still respect your environment's configured `NODE_ENV` variable and thereby be unaffected.
If you do not use `NODE_ENV` in your own code to trigger security-sensitive functionality, **you are not impacted** by this vulnerability.
An example of code that would be affected, might be the following:
```typescript
if (process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'production') {
// this code would unintentionally run in your production builds
}
```
### Technical Description
The problem comes from esbuild defaulting `NODE_ENV` to `"development"` when a platform configuration is undefined.
You can read about why `esbuild` has that behaviour in their documentation
https://esbuild.github.io/api/#platform, but the result for Keystone users is that user Typescript was compiled, and had inlined `NODE_ENV` to the constant `"development"`.
Your application's dependencies, as found in `node_modules` (including `@keystone-6/core`), are typically not compiled as part of this process, and thus should be unaffected. Therefore any libraries that used `NODE_ENV` to trigger particular behaviours (optimisations, security or otherwise) should still respect your environment's `NODE_ENV`.
We have tested this assumption by verifying that `NODE_ENV=production yarn keystone start` still uses secure cookies when using `statelessSessions`.
Thereby, the severity of this vulnerability is dependent on what functionality users conditionally triggered, in their own code, depending on the expectation that `NODE_ENV` would be correctly configured in their application. In accordance with Common Vulnerability Scoring System `2.3.3. Assume Vulnerable Configurations`, this security advisory assumes vulnerable configurations and is thus marked as *critical*, but you should evaluate the true security impact for your application to determine a relevant score.
### Patches
This vulnerability has been fixed in `@keystone-6/core@3.0.2`, thanks to @mmachatschek in
https://github.com/keystonejs/keystone/pull/8031/.
We have added regression tests for this vulnerability in
https://github.com/keystonejs/keystone/pull/8063.
### Workarounds
If you cannot upgrade your `@keystone-6/core` version for any reason, your best alternative is to remove any code that uses `NODE_ENV` in a way that may reasonably impact your application security.
### References
-
https://esbuild.github.io/api/#platform
-
https://github.com/keystonejs/keystone/pull/8031
-
https://github.com/keystonejs/keystone/pull/8063
### For more information
Thanks to Austin Burdine
https://github.com/acburdine for reporting this problem as a potential security vulnerability.
If you have any questions around this security advisory, please don't hesitate to contact us at [security@keystonejs.com](mailto:security@keystonejs.com), or open an issue on GitHub
https://github.com/keystonejs/keystone/issues/new/choose.
If you have a security flaw to report for any software in this repository, please see our SECURITY policy
https://github.com/keystonejs/keystone/blob/main/SECURITY.md.