Resource exhaustion in Scrapy Protego
CVE-2026-55520
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.
Vulnerability class: DoS (Denial of Service)
Published · last modified .
EPSS exploit prediction
EPSS: 0.005 (41.8th percentile), scored .
Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 42nd percentile — 41.8% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.
EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.004 · newest: 0.005 · change: +0.001
Affected products
- Scrapy Protego — versions < 0.6.2