A vulnerability's lifetime: enhancing version information in CVE databases

Abstract

The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) is a rich source of information for system administrators, software engineers, IT security consultants, and researchers in software security. Relevant information is provided in machine readable form and hence can be used for automated software security management. However, we discovered that information on affected software versions and fix information is not always available in structured form. We therefore propose to enrich the NVD database with this information and use a rule-based approach to extract this information from the informal vulnerability description. Such information is useful in software development to exchange or avoid vulnerable components as well as in security research for directed cause analysis.