Towards Automated Context-aware Vulnerability Risk Management

Sammanfattning: The information security landscape continually evolves with increasing publicly known vulnerabilities (e.g., 25064 new vulnerabilities in 2022). Vulnerabilities play a prominent role in all types of security related attacks, including ransomware and data breaches. Vulnerability Risk Management (VRM) is an essential cyber defense mechanism to eliminate or reduce attack surfaces in information technology. VRM is a continuous procedure of identification, classification, evaluation, and remediation of vulnerabilities. The traditional VRM procedure is time-consuming as classification, evaluation, and remediation require skills and knowledge of specific computer systems, software, network, and security policies. Activities requiring human input slow down the VRM process, increasing the risk of exploiting a vulnerability.The thesis introduces the Automated Context-aware Vulnerability Risk Management (ACVRM) methodology to improve VRM procedures by automating the entire VRM cycle and reducing the procedure time and experts' intervention. ACVRM focuses on the challenging stages (i.e., classification, evaluation, and remediation) of VRM to support security experts in promptly prioritizing and patching the vulnerabilities. ACVRM concept is designed and implemented in a test environment for proof of concept. The efficiency of patch prioritization by ACVRM compared against a commercial vulnerability management tool (i.e., Rudder). ACVRM prioritized the vulnerability based on the patch score (i.e., the numeric representation of the vulnerability characteristic and the risk), the historical data, and dependencies. The experiments indicate that ACVRM could rank the vulnerabilities in the organization's context by weighting the criteria used in patch score calculation. The automated patch deployment is implemented with three use cases to investigate the impact of learning from historical events and dependencies on the success rate of the patch and human intervention. Our finding shows that ACVRM reduced the need for human actions, increased the ratio of successfully patched vulnerabilities, and decreased the cycle time of VRM process.