It’s worrisome that in 2020 we still have people in influential technical roles that don’t understand CVE. A friend told me earlier this year he was in a meeting where someone said that CVE IDs are assigned in order, so CVE-2020-9500 meant there were 9500 vulns in 2020 so far. Of course that is not how it works and a dangerous understanding of CVE.
I ran across an article written by Nick Malkiewicz of Anaconda titled “Why Understanding CVEs Is Critical for Data Scientists“. This article has several bits that show a lack of understanding of what CVE is. One of the biggest is equivocating a CVE with a vulnerability. Yes, many vulnerabilities directly map to a single CVE identifier, but a CVE is the identifier not the vulnerability. Additionally, sometimes one vulnerability can track with multiple CVE IDs, or one CVE ID can track to multiple vulnerabilities. So lines like the following are concerning:
When someone finds a CVE, they report it to a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA).
When someone finds a vulnerability, they report it to MITRE or a vendor, who may be a CNA but more often not one. That vendor can then ask MITRE for an ID via a web form.
CNAs assign identification numbers to CVEs and list them in publicly accessible databases.
A CNA is required to inform MITRE after a CVE-assigned vulnerability has been disclosed. That is actually a fairly recent rule, implemented in the last few years. For most of CVE’s history there was no requirement or specific communication channel for a CNA to notify MITRE of this. That was one of many failings of the CVE ecosystem and directly led to companies being breached, as they relied on CVE to be ‘complete’ and timely.
Each vulnerability listed in a CVE database has a score from .1 to 10, 10 being the highest risk level. These scores are based on exploitability, impact, remediation level, report confidence, and other qualities.
Technically, not even the first line is true as NVD can score a vulnerability as 0.0, meaning it is not a vulnerability and poses no risk. This occurs when a researcher or vendor disclose a vulnerability but don’t fully understand the issue or the subsequent impact. This happens hundreds of times a year although many are not included in NVD. The second sentence from Anaconda is also incorrect as NVD only scores CVSS Base scores. The exploitability, remediation level, and report confidence are part of Temporal scores and not included. You can see an example with CVE-2020-2800 published by Oracle and given a CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N score by both Oracle and NVD. This misunderstanding of NVD CVSS scoring is more baffling as Anaconda links to the same FIRST CVSS document I do in this paragraph.
Anaconda goes on talking about how there are other factors at play including looking at the history of a package, how fast vendors respond, and more. This is great advice and critical for companies facing tens of thousands of vulnerabilities a year. Unfortunately, they slide into the “more lipstick on that pig” problem:
The good news is, there are tools that automate the CVE monitoring process.
This is true. But, more ways to manipulate bad data still leaves you with bad data. In addition to CVE missing several thousand vulnerabilities a year, their push for quantity in the last few years have led to a serious hit on quality. There are some CVE IDs that have descriptions missing critical information like the vendor, affected version, or impact. All the data wrangling and fancy analysis of that data is still based on bad or incomplete information. All the lipstick on that pig still makes it a pig.
Finally, I will quote on other line from their blog that is curious:
Hacking open-source software also has a bigger payoff because many more people use it.
I understand and appreciate the sentiment, and finding a vulnerability in a library like OpenSSL obviously has a huge impact. However, that and a couple dozen libraries are still the outliers in the bigger picture. Compare your vulnerabilities like EternalBlue to a standard open source library vulnerability and they are not even close as far as how “many more people use it”.