NIST gives up enriching most CVEs

Posted by mooreds 2 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by smsm42 1 hour ago

> This opens the door for a lot of infosec drama. Some of the organizations that issue CVE numbers are also the makers of the "reported" software, and these companies are extremely likely to issue low severity scores and downplay their own bugs.

It is true but the reverse is also true. It may be very hard for an external body to issue proper scoring and narrative for bugs in thousands of various software packages. Some bugs are easy, like if you get instant root on a Unix system by typing "please give me root", then it's probably a high severity issue. But a lot of bugs are not simple and require a lot of deep product knowledge and understanding of the system to properly grade. The knowledge that is frequently not widely available outside of the organization. And, for example, assigning panic scores to issues that are very niche and theoretical, and do not affect most users at all, may also be counter-productive and lead to massive waste of time and resources.

Comment by zbentley 1 hour ago

Very true. So many regulated/government security contexts use “critical” or “high” sev ratings as synonymous for “you can’t declare this unexploitable in context or write up a preexisting-mitigations blurb, you must take action and make the scanner stop detecting this”, which leads to really stupid prioritization and silliness.

Comment by gibsonsmog 1 hour ago

At a previous job, we had to refactor our entire front end build system from Rollup(I believe it was) to a custom Webpack build because of this attitude. Our FE process was completely disconnected from the code on the site, existing entirely in our Azure pipeline and developer machines. The actual theoretically exploitable aspects were in third party APIs and our dotNet ecosystems which we obviously fixed. I wrote like 3 different documents and presented multiple times to their security team on how this wasn't necessary and we didn't want to take their money needlessly. $20000 or so later (with a year of support for the system baked in) we shut up Dependabot. Money well spent!

Comment by lokar 6 minutes ago

My favorite: a Linux kernel pcmcia bug. On EC2 VMs.

Comment by rdtsc 12 minutes ago

> It is true but the reverse is also true.

Yup. Almost every single time, NVD came up with some ridiculously inflated numbers without any rhyme or reason. Every time I saw their evaluation it lowered my impression of them.

Comment by tptacek 46 minutes ago

The NVD was an absolutely wretched source of severity data for vulnerabilities and there is no meaningful impact to vendors/submitters supplying their own CVSS scores, other than that it continues the farce of CVSS in a reduced form, which is a missed opportunity.

Comment by j16sdiz 1 hour ago

TBH, I don't see much enrichment they are giving in last 5 or 6 years.

Comment by pimlottc 12 minutes ago

What is the data that NIST is adding for enriched entries?

Comment by rwmj 1 hour ago

https://archive.ph/S8ajd

"Enrichment" apparently is their term for adding detailed information about bugs to the CVE database.

Comment by DeepYogurt 1 hour ago

Long overdue to be honest.

Comment by Retr0id 1 hour ago

Maybe we should just assign UUIDs

Comment by woodruffw 1 minute ago

Separate from everything else, this would have the virtuous effect of reducing clout-chasing via CVE IDs. It's not quite as cool (for some definition of "cool") to have 095503C9-B080-4C43-AAB6-B704DEB2FAF7 on your resume as it is to have CVE-20XX-YYYYY.

Comment by shevy-java 50 minutes ago

> Going forward, NIST says its staff will only add data—in a process called enrichment—only for important vulnerabilities.

Now - I am not saying I disagree with everything here, mind you; I guess everyone may agree that CVEs may range in severity. But then the question also is ... what is the point of an organisation that is cut down to, say, handle 1% of CVEs - and ignore the rest? Why have such an organisation then to begin with?

I don't have enough data to conclude anything, but from a superficial glance it kind of seems like trying to cut down on standards or efficiency.

Comment by tsimionescu 36 minutes ago

NIST does many other things in addition to handling the CVE database.

Comment by tptacek 5 minutes ago

Like producing the world's most premium peanut butter!

https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=2387

(The only problem with it is that it's backdoored the NSA.)