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Fighting N-day vulnerabilities with automated CVSS vector prediction at disclosure

Published: 25 August 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is the industry standard for describing the characteristics of a software vulnerability and measuring its severity. However, during the first days after a vulnerability disclosure, the initial human readable description of the vulnerability is not available as a machine readable CVSS vector yet. This situation creates a period of time when only expensive manual analysis can be used to react to new vulnerabilities because no data is available for cheaper automated analysis yet. We present a new technique based on linear regression to automatically predict the CVSS vector of newly disclosed vulnerabilities using only their human readable descriptions, with a strong emphasis on decision explicability. Our experimental results suggest real world applicability.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ARES '20: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security
August 2020
1073 pages
ISBN:9781450388337
DOI:10.1145/3407023
  • Program Chairs:
  • Melanie Volkamer,
  • Christian Wressnegger
© 2020 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of a national government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 August 2020

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Author Tags

  1. CVE
  2. CVSS
  3. linear regression
  4. machine learning
  5. security

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  • Brittany Council

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ARES 2020

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Overall Acceptance Rate 228 of 451 submissions, 51%

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