Keystone is a headless CMS for Node.js — built with GraphQL and React.`@keystone-6/core@3.0.0 || 3.0.1` users that use `NODE_ENV` to trigger security-sensitive functionality in their production builds are vulnerable to `NODE_ENV` being inlined to `"development"` for user code, irrespective of what your environment variables. If you do not use `NODE_ENV` in your user code to trigger security-sensitive functionality, you are not impacted by this vulnerability. Any dependencies that use `NODE_ENV` to trigger particular behaviors (optimizations, security or otherwise) should still respect your environment's configured `NODE_ENV` variable. The 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. We have tested this assumption by verifying that `NODE_ENV=production yarn keystone start` still uses secure cookies when using `statelessSessions`. This vulnerability has been fixed in @keystone-6/core@3.0.2, regression tests have been added for this vulnerability in #8063.
Affected: npm: @keystone-6/core
### 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) sho…