npm audit reporting numerous security vulnerabilities in the current build

[sshelton76]

I was working on a clean fork of the master branch and on a lark I decided to run npm audit.

found 1325 vulnerabilities (2 low, 1287 moderate, 36 high) in 526462 scanned packages
run npm audit fix to fix 1324 of them.
1 vulnerability requires manual review. See the full report for details.

I'm always hesitant to trust automated tools, but I think it would be advisable for someone to take a look at what it's finding and determine what's what.

update
I opened and deleted some comments a little while ago believing I might be on an ancient branch. I double checked that I am on the 1.0 branch now and getting about the same results.

[sshelton76]

I've created a branch called "audit" on my own fork in order to test the changes.
https://github.com/sshelton76/web3.js/tree/audit

Looks like it builds clean without errors, but tests are failing. However it looks like tests are failing on a clean pull of 1.0 for the same reasons. I'll open a separate issue for that.

[nivida]

These issues are mostly because of lodash and js-yaml. The security vulnerabilities got detected between the last and current release of Web3. NPM audit fix will update the dependencies and fix it.

[nivida]

Updated dependencies by audit fix:

+ babel-jest@24.7.1
+ @babel/preset-env@7.4.4
+ @babel/core@7.4.4

Manually updated dependencies:

+ jest@24.7.1

Nine "security vulnerabilities" are left because lerna (8) didn't release a new version until now and because I'm using istanbul-combine (1) to combine the coverage reports.

[wbt]

FYI, the latest version from the 1.x branch is reporting 1401 vulnerabilities (1378 low, 10 moderate, 13 high).

[cgewecke]

@wbt

Fwiw the only public facing vuln is for Web3 itself and relates to wallet storage. Everything else is in the development dependency tree.

Root dependencies with sub-dependencies (like handlebars etc) flagged by npm audit are:

High

• lerna
• nyc
• geth-dev-assistant

Moderate

• lerna
• nyc
• browserify (vuln is: acorn - Regular Expression Denial of Service)
• dependency-check

These are mostly tools used in CI. We are updating Lerna today.