Vulnerability Management Life Cycle
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Analysis and Exploration of Vulnerabilities
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Select the assets to be assessed and define priorities.
Some assets may be excluded due to potential impact or cost.
Characterize the systems/software state.
Determine what is known and what must be assessed.
Known vulnerabilities may be ignored from the assessment.
Assess the entities for vulnerabilities.
Takes into consideration priorities.
Takes into consideration scope.
Construct a detailed report with:
What vulnerability was found?
What are the affected entities?
What are the recommendations to handle it?
Assessment usually doesn’t exploit the vulnerability or build an exploit chain.
It’s not a penetration test.
A subject close to software testing but with a focus on security-related impact.
Extensively studied in the Robust Software course.
Highly dependent on the scope of the assessment.
Application: Static, Dynamic, or Component Analysis.
Network entity: Protocol, message, authentication, authorization analysis.
Processes/Companies: OSINT, Social Engineering.
Researchers have no information about internal aspects and are presented with a publicly available view.
No source code, no documentation.
Assumes an actor with a specific set of resources.
Script kiddie, a researcher, competitor, a crowd-based effort.
Aims to mimic assessments from outside attackers.
Finds what can be explored by intruders with no access.
Usually finds vulnerabilities easier to exploit.
May find alternative paths and use cases (which may present vulnerabilities).
Limited on the impact of the assessment.
Existing vulnerabilities with remedies (e.g. Firewall) may not be detected.
Researchers are given full documentation and access to systems.
A replica of the production system.
The production system with a limited scope.
The source code and infrastructure code.
Aims to find faults and bugs in all scoped domains.
Assumes an actor at any location (insider and outsider).
Finds what can be exploited by: outsiders, insiders, outsiders with lateral movement.
May mimic specific users and roles.
Extensive (and expensive) analysis of the domains.
Remedies are known and considered, but vulnerability may still be found.
Some information is provided to researchers.
Documentation about the application or systems.
A specific set of credentials.
Aims to find faults and bugs in a limited set of scoped domains.
Can mimic a specific user.
The company takes into consideration the report and assesses the risk.
For every asset with vulnerabilities.
Assign risk indicators (3-4 levels).
Risk assessment may take into consideration all vulnerabilities found.
Individual vulnerabilities may be combined in an exploit chain with higher impact.
Researchers should carefully document assessments.
Describe the rationale for the assessment, the strategy, and the findings.
Essential in cooperation between teams.
Important to understand how vulnerability was explored, and what the impact may be.
Wrong attitude: we found this, you are not doing your job.
Correct attitude: we found this, which may be caused by that, this is the impact, you may fix it by doing X.
Clients may not understand the vulnerability, the reason, or the impact.
The company implements methods to increase the security of its assets.
May fix the vulnerability.
Correct software bugs or flaws.
Implement specific configurations.
Update software/firmware.
This capability is not always present.
May reduce the impact of a successful exploitation.
Implement mechanisms that reduce impact to a smaller domain.
Implement redundancy and fail recovery.
This may increase the cost of exploiting the vulnerability.
Deploy firewalls or change its rules.
Increase isolation so that assets are not available in a domain.
Verifies the effectiveness of the remediation.
Involves assessing the existence and risk of the vulnerabilities found.
Using the same scope!
Vulnerability risk may be similar if explored from other perspectives.
E.g. External vs Internal actor.
Deploys mechanism to detect the vulnerability being explored.
May consider variations.
Involves configuring Firewalls, log analysis systems, IDS/NIDS/HIDS, profillers.
