Versions of the package web3-utils before 4.2.1 are vulnerable to Prototype Pollution via the utility functions format and mergeDeep, due to insecure recursive merge. An attacker can manipulate an objects prototype, potentially leading to the alteration of the behavior of all objects inheriting from the affected prototype by passing specially crafted input to these functions.
The product receives input from an upstream component that specifies attributes that are to be initialized or updated in an object, but it does not properly control modifications of attributes of the object prototype.
By adding or modifying attributes of an object prototype, it is possible to create attributes that exist on every object, or replace critical attributes with malicious ones. This can be problematic if the product depends on existence or non-existence of certain attributes, or uses pre-defined attributes of object prototype (such as hasOwnProperty, toString or valueOf). This weakness is usually exploited by using a special attribute of objects called proto, constructor or prototype. Such attributes give access to the object prototype. This weakness is often found in code that assigns object attributes based on user input, or merges or clones objects recursively.