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Surely listing sensitive files is asking for trouble?

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Some people are concerned that listing pages or directories in the /robots.txt file may invite unintended access. There are two answers to this.

The first answer is a workaround: You could put all the files you don't want robots to visit in a separate sub directory, make that directory un-listable on the web (by configuring your server), then place your files in there, and list only the directory name in the /robots.txt. Now an ill-willed robot won't traverse that directory unless you or someone else puts a direct link on the web to one of your files, and then it's not /robots.txt fault.

For example, rather than:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /foo.html
Disallow: /bar.html

do:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /norobots/

and make a "norobots" directory, put foo.html and bar.html into it, and configure your server to not generate a directory listing for that directory. Now all an attacker would learn is that you have a "norobots" directory, but he won't be able to list the files in there; he'd need to guess their names.

However, in practice this is a bad idea -- it's too fragile. Someone may publish a link to your files on their site. Or it may turn up in a publicly accessible log file, say of you user's proxy server, or maybe it will show up in someone's web server log as a Referer. Or someone may misconfigure your server at some future date, "fixing" it to show a directory listing. Which leads me to the real answer:

The real answer is that /robots.txt is not intended for access control, so don't try to use it as such. Think of it as a "No Entry" sign, not a locked door. If you have files on your web site that you don't want unauthorized people to access, then configure your server to do authentication, and configure appropriate authorization. Basic Authentication has been around since the early days of the web (and in e.g. Apache on UNIX is trivial to configure). Modern content management systems support access controls on individual pages and collections of resources.

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