#vulnerability databases

For those not familiar, Mehul Revankar recently started a podcast named Noise2Signal. While there are a lot of podcasts out there and it is easy to lose track, this one stands out as Mehul has connections with a lot of folks that are significant in the history of information security. In fact, he interviewed Renaud Deraison who created Nessus and was one of the founders of Tenable. That is where…

Within the vulnerability ecosystem, the CVE project / vulnerability database is certainly the most well-known. Over the past 30 years many others have come and gone, and others are still around. Some of you will recognize SecurityFocus BID, Open Sourced Vulnerability Database (OSVDB), Secunia, VulnDB, OSV, and others. Started in 1997, there is another that has spent three decades flying under…

Vulnerability disclosure analysts are long familiar with so-called “mega advisories”, ones that typically come from vendors and often for products that ship appliances using hundreds of libraries or products with an entire operating system included. Such advisories can literally represent over 500 vulnerabilities in one shot. I’ll try to make this a bit fun! Disclaimer: I am going to use one…

Blog Origins In the last year or two, I have increasingly used the term “CVE farming” in conversations and LinkedIn posts [1]. This has led a few people to ask what it meant and I gave a very cliff notes version of the answer. I started taking notes for this blog a while back expecting for the question to come up more and more. Weeks back the topic came up again on LinkedIn and I said something…

On December 17, 2024, MITRE announced five new CVE Numbering Authorities (CNA) on their Twitter feed as well as their news page. However, there were actually seven added according to the CNAs page based on tracking it daily. Last year, when I asked about a discrepancy in tracking the CNAs, MITRE promptly replied to clarify. Earlier this year, when I asked about another discrepancy I didn’t…

Introduction This week, or in the next two, we’re likely to see MITRE heralding the milestone of minting their 400th CVE Numbering Authority (CNA). These are, primarily, organizations that can assign a CVE ID without having to go to MITRE each time to obtain the ID. This is part of what MITRE calls a “federated” model that allows for more dynamic and responsive assignments without a central…

Tom Alrich published a blog titled “The Global Vulnerability Database won’t be a “database” at all” on November 10, 2023. In the blog Tom lays out some ideas for how this “database” would operate and the advantages he sees. I didn’t see this blog until early May and posted my “Thoughts on Tom Alrich’s “Global Vulnerability Database”“. Tom and I had a little back and forth on LinkedIn as he was…

Yesterday, at the first inaugural VulnCon, Tanya Brewer from the NVD gave a presentation that was listed on the agenda as “NVD Symposium”. At the talk, her slides began with a header “The National Vulnerability Database: Exploring Opportunities”. However, neither were the primary topic that most people were interested in. Fortunately for the crowd Tanya, the NVD Program Manager for the last four…