Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
research-article

An analysis of how many undiscovered vulnerabilities remain in information systems

Published: 01 August 2023 Publication History
  • Get Citation Alerts
  • Abstract

    Vulnerability management strategy, from both organizational and public policy perspectives, hinges on an understanding of the supply of undiscovered vulnerabilities. If the number of undiscovered vulnerabilities is small enough, then a reasonable investment strategy would be to focus on finding and removing the remaining undiscovered vulnerabilities. If the number of undiscovered vulnerabilities is and will continue to be large, then a better investment strategy would be to focus on quick patch dissemination and engineering resilient systems. This paper examines a paradigm, namely that the number of undiscovered vulnerabilities is manageably small, through the lens of mathematical concepts from the theory of computing. From this perspective, we find little support for the paradigm of limited undiscovered vulnerabilities. We then briefly support the notion that these theory-based conclusions are relevant to practical computers in use today. We find no reason to believe undiscovered vulnerabilities are not essentially unlimited in practice and we examine the possible economic impacts should this be the case. Based on our analysis, we recommend vulnerability management strategy adopts an approach favoring quick patch dissemination and engineering resilient systems, while continuing good software engineering practices to reduce (but never eliminate) vulnerabilities in information systems.

    References

    [1]
    S. Ali, P. Anantharaman, Z. Lucas, S.W. Smith, What we have here is failure to validate: summer of langsec, IEEE Secur. Privacy 19 (3) (2021) 17–23.
    [2]
    P. Anantharaman, Protecting systems from exploits using language-theoretic security, Dartmouth College, 2022, PhD thesis.
    [3]
    R.J. Anderson, Why information security is hard: an economic perspective, Computer Security Applications Conference, IEEE, New Orleans, LA, 2001, pp. 358–365.
    [4]
    K.R. Apt, Ten years of Hoare’s logic: a survey—Part I, ACM Trans. Program. Lang.Syst. (TOPLAS) 3 (4) (1981) 431–483.
    [5]
    E. Barker, Recommendation for key Management: Part 1 – General, Tech. Rep. SP 800-57r5, US Dept of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, 2020.
    [6]
    E.T. Barr, D.W. Binkley, M. Harman, M.N. Seghir, Sub-turing islands in the wild, CoRR (2019) abs/1905.12734.
    [7]
    V. Benetis, O. Caleff, C. Hoepers, A. Horneman, A. Householder, K.P. Kossakowski, A. Manion, A. Mullens, S. Perl, D. Roethlisberger, S. Rokas, M. Rossell, R.M. Ruefle, D. Sacher, K.T. Tzvetanov, M. Zajicek, Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) Services Framework, Tech. Rep. ver. 2, FIRST, Cary, NC, USA, 2019.
    [8]
    K. Bhargavan, B. Blanchet, N. Kobeissi, Verified models and reference implementations for the TLS 1.3 standard candidate, Symposium on Security and Privacy, IEEE, 2017, pp. 483–502.
    [9]
    M. Böhme, S. Paul, A probabilistic analysis of the efficiency of automated software testing, Trans. Softw. Eng. 42 (4) (2015) 345–360.
    [10]
    G.S. Boolos, J.P. Burgess, R.C. Jeffrey, Computability and Logic, 4th ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002.
    [11]
    C. Calcagno, D. Distefano, J. Dubreil, D. Gabi, P. Hooimeijer, M. Luca, P. O’Hearn, I. Papakonstantinou, J. Purbrick, D. Rodriguez, Moving fast with software verification, NASA Formal Methods, LNCS, Vol. 9058, Springer, 2015, pp. 3–11.
    [12]
    C. Calcagno, P.W. O’Hearn, H. Yang, Local action and abstract separation logic, Logic in Computer Science, IEEE, 2007, pp. 366–378.
    [13]
    J.L. Cebula, L.R. Young, A Taxonomy of Operational Cyber Security Risks, Tech. Rep. CMU/SEI-2010-TN-028, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 2010.
    [14]
    CISA, OpenSSL “Heartbleed” Vulnerability (CVE-2014-0160), Tech. Rep. TA14-098A, US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, 2014.
    [15]
    S. Cowger, Y. Lee, N. Schimanski, M. Tullsen, W. Woods, R. Jones, E. Davis, W. Harris, T. Brunson, C. Harmon, et al., ICARUS: understanding de facto formats by way of feathers and wax, Security and Privacy Workshops, IEEE, 2020, pp. 327–334.
    [16]
    M. Dellago, D.W. Woods, A.C. Simpson, Characterising 0-day exploit brokers, Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, 2022.
    [17]
    T. Dullien, Weird machines, exploitability, and provable unexploitability, Trans. Emerg. Top. Comput. 8 (2) (2017) 391–403.
    [18]
    J.H. Fetzer, Program verification: the very idea, Commun. ACM 31 (9) (1988) 1048–1063.
    [19]
    K. Fisher, J. Launchbury, R. Richards, The HACMS program: using formal methods to eliminate exploitable bugs, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. A Math. Phys. Eng. Sci. 375 (2104) (2017) 20150401.
    [20]
    W. Frakes, C. Terry, Software reuse: metrics and models, ACM Comput. Surv. (CSUR) 28 (2) (1996) 415–435.
    [21]
    D. Geer, Cybersecurity as realpolitik, Black Hat USA 2014 (Las Vegas, Nevada), UBM, 2014.
    [22]
    A.D. Householder, J. Spring, Are we skillful or just lucky? Interpreting the possible histories of vulnerability disclosures, Digital Threats (2021).
    [23]
    A.D. Householder, G. Wassermann, A. Manion, C. King, The CERT® Guide to Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure, Tech. Rep. CMU/SEI-2017-TR-022, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 2020.
    [24]
    L. Lamport, What good is temporal logic?, in: Mason R. (Ed.), IFIP Congress, Elsevier, 1983, pp. 657–668.
    [25]
    L. Lamport, Specifying Systems: The TLA+ Language and Tools for Hardware and Software Engineers, Addison-Wesley, Boston, MA, USA, 2002.
    [26]
    A.P. Layton, T. Robinson, I.B. Tucker, Economics for today, Cengage Learning Australia, 2016.
    [27]
    J. Lee, K. Lee, et al., Spillover effect of ransomware: economic analysis of web vulnerability market, Res. Briefs Inf. Commun.Technol. Evol. 3 (2017) 193–203.
    [28]
    V.J.M. Manès, H. Han, C. Han, S.K. Cha, M. Egele, E.J. Schwartz, M. Woo, The art, science, and engineering of fuzzing: asurvey, IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. (2019).
    [29]
    P. Mundkur, L. Briesemeister, N. Shankar, P. Anantharaman, S. Ali, Z. Lucas, S. Smith, The parsley data format definition language, Security and Privacy Workshops, IEEE, 2020, pp. 300–307.
    [30]
    Office of the DoD Chief Information Officer, DoD Vulnerability Management, Tech. Rep. 8531.01, US Department of Defense, Washington, DC, 2020.
    [31]
    P.W. O’Hearn, From categorical logic to facebook engineering, Logic in Computer Science (LICS), IEEE, 2015, pp. 17–20.
    [32]
    A. Ozment, S.E. Schechter, Milk or wine: does software security improve with age?, USENIX Security Symposium, Vol. 15, 2006, pp. 93–104.
    [33]
    Peterson D. Medical cybersecurity & dense vulnerabilities. 2018.
    [34]
    K.H. Pollock, Review papers: modeling capture, recapture, and removal statistics for estimation of demographic parameters for fish and wildlife populations: past, present, and future, J Am Stat Assoc 86 (413) (1991) 225–238.
    [35]
    G. Primiero, F.J. Solheim, J.M. Spring, On malfunction, mechanisms, and malware classification, Philos. Technol. 32 (2) (2018) 339–362.
    [36]
    D. Pym, J.M. Spring, P. O’Hearn, Why separation logic works, Philos. Technol. 32 (2018) 483–516.
    [37]
    P. Raatikainen, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, in: Zalta E.N. (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Springer, 2015.
    [38]
    K. Reilly, J. Torrey, J. Frank, T. Brunson, Crema, Tech. Rep. AFRL-RI-RS-TR-2015-188, Assured Information Security, Inc., Rome, NY, 2015.
    [39]
    H.G. Rice, Classes of recursively enumerable sets and their decision problems, Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 74 (2) (1953) 358–366.
    [40]
    L. Sassaman, M.L. Patterson, S. Bratus, M.E. Locasto, Security applications of formal language theory, IEEE Syst. J. 7 (3) (2013) 489–500.
    [41]
    F.B. Schneider, Enforceable security policies, Trans. Inf. Syst. Secur.(TISSEC) 3 (1) (2000) 30–50.
    [42]
    B. Schneier, Should u.s. hackers fix cybersecurity holes or exploit them?, The Atlantic, 2014.
    [43]
    Shirey R. Internet security glossary, version 2. 2007. RFC 4949 (Informational).
    [44]
    M. Spencer, Creative malfunction: finding fault with rowhammer, Comput. Cult. 8 (2021).
    [45]
    J.M. Spring, A. Galyardt, A.D. Householder, N. VanHoudnous, On managing vulnerabilities in ML/AI systems, New Security Paradigms Workshop, ACM, 2020.
    [46]
    J.M. Spring, E. Hatleback, A.D. Householder, A. Manion, D. Shick, Prioritizing vulnerability response: astakeholder-specific vulnerability categorization, Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, 2020.
    [47]
    J.P. Sterbenz, D. Hutchison, E.K. Çetinkaya, A. Jabbar, J.P. Rohrer, M. Schöller, P. Smith, Resilience and survivability in communication networks: strategies, principles, and survey of disciplines, Comput. Netw. 54 (8) (2010) 1245–1265.
    [48]
    N. Swamy, T. Ramananandro, A. Rastogi, I. Spiridonova, H. Ni, D. Malloy, J. Vazquez, M. Tang, O. Cardona, A. Gupta, Hardening attack surfaces with formally proven binary format parsers, Intl Conf on Programming Language Design and Implementation, ACM, 2022, pp. 31–45.
    [49]
    F. Szidarovszky, S. Yakowitz, A new proof of the existence and uniqueness of the cournot equilibrium, Int. Econ. Rev. (Philadelphia) (1977) 787–789.
    [50]
    A.M. Turing, On computable numbers, with an application to the entscheidungsproblem, Proc. London Math. Soc. 2 (1) (1936) 230–265.

    Cited By

    View all

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image Computers and Security
    Computers and Security  Volume 131, Issue C
    Aug 2023
    298 pages

    Publisher

    Elsevier Advanced Technology Publications

    United Kingdom

    Publication History

    Published: 01 August 2023

    Author Tags

    1. Vulnerability analysis
    2. Economics of information security
    3. Turing machine
    4. Security policy
    5. Vulnerability management

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)0
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all

    View Options

    View options

    Get Access

    Login options

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media