CVE-2026-55520: Protego: Exponential backtracking ReDoS in robots.txt URL wildcard matching
scrapy · protego
Affected: scrapy protego · Exploitation: unlikely (under 1%)
Not in CyberSIXT coverage yet: no article names this CVE. This page shows the public record.
Higher than 44% of scored CVEs
DescriptionCVE.org
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.
Affected products1
From the CVE record. A product or version that is not listed is unknown, not unaffected.
- scrapy · protego< 0.6.2
On the Atlas
Every published CVE is on the CyberSIXT Atlas, grouped by weakness, vendor and month.
- Exploitation
- Unlikely (under 1%). EPSS under 1%, or no score yet.
- CISA KEV
- Not listed
- Public check
- No public nuclei template
- Vendor
- scrapy
- Published
- August 2026
CoverageNo articles yet
No CyberSIXT article names CVE-2026-55520 yet, so there is no coverage timeline, action brief or change log for it. Everything on this page comes from the public CVE record, CISA KEV, EPSS and the nuclei template index. Search the archive or see the CVEs in the news.