Title
Towards Automated Assessment of Vulnerability Exposures in Security Operations
Abstract
Current approaches for risk analysis of software vulnerabilities using manual assessment and numeric scoring do not complete fast enough to keep pace with the maintenance work rate to patch and mitigate the vulnerabilities. This paper proposes a new approach to modeling software vulnerability risk in the context of the network environment and firewall configuration. In the approach, vulnerability features are automatically matched up with networking, target asset, and adversary features to determine whether adversaries can exploit a vulnerability. The ability of adversaries to reach a vulnerability is modeled by automatically identifying the network services associated with vulnerabilities through a pipeline of machine learning and natural language processing and automatically analyzing network reachability. Our results show that the pipeline can identify network services accurately. We also find that only a small number of vulnerabilities pose real risks to a system. However, if left unmitigated, adversarial reach to vulnerabilities may extend to nullify the effect of firewall countermeasures.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1007/978-3-030-90019-9_4
SECURITY AND PRIVACY IN COMMUNICATION NETWORKS, SECURECOMM 2021, PT I
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Software vulnerability, Risk analysis, Artificial intelligence
Conference
398
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1867-8211
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Philip Dale Huff111.03
Qing-Hua Li2156388.15