Protego is a pure-Python robots.txt parser with support for modern conventions. Prior to 0.6.2, protego._urlpattern._URLPattern._prepare_pattern_for_regex translates every asterisk in an Allow or Disallow directive into a lazy regular-expression wildcard, so a directive containing many asterisks creates exponential backtracking. After protego.Protego.parse processes a crafted robots.txt file, protego.Protego.can_fetch can spend an attacker-controlled period matching a near-miss URL and deny service to the crawler. The vulnerable path is src/protego/_urlpattern.py in the _URLPattern match logic. This issue is fixed in version 0.6.2.
{
"cna_assigner": "GitHub_M",
"cwe_ids": [
"CWE-1333",
"CWE-400"
],
"osv_generated_from": "https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/tree/main/cves/2026/55xxx/CVE-2026-55520.json"
}{
"extracted_events": [
{
"range": [
{
"introduced": "0"
},
{
"fixed": "0.6.2"
}
],
"source": "AFFECTED_FIELD",
"strategy": "StringRangeExpression"
},
{
"range": [
{
"fixed": "785940181659bf440ba82f1da148fade5087e858"
}
],
"source": "REFERENCES_COMMIT"
},
{
"original_tag": "0.6.2",
"range": [
{
"fixed": "efe5039d39ee51f117acd0b01ffd8109ae265c22"
}
],
"source": "REFERENCES_TAG"
}
]
}