Improving VRSS-based vulnerability prioritization using analytic hierarchy process

The number of vulnerabilities discovered in computer systems has increased explosively. Thus, a key question for system administrators is which vulnerabilities to prioritize. The need for vulnerability prioritization in organizations is widely recognized. The significant role of the vulnerability evaluation system is to separate vulnerabilities from each other as far as possible. There are two major methods to assess the severity of vulnerabilities: qualitative and quantitative methods. In this paper, we first describe the design space of vulnerability evaluation methodology and discuss the measures of well-defined evaluation framework. We analyze 11,395 CVE vulnerabilities to expose the differences among three current vulnerability evaluation systems (X-Force, CVSS and VRSS). We find that vulnerabilities are not separated from each other as much as possible. In order to increase the diversity of the results, we firstly enable vulnerability type to prioritize vulnerabilities using analytic hierarchy process on the basis of VRSS. We quantitatively characterize the vulnerability type and apply the method on the set of 11,395 CVE vulnerabilities. The results show that the quality of the quantitative scores can be improved with the help of vulnerability type. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.