On computing enterprise IT risk metrics

Sandeep Bhatt, William Horne, Prasad Rao

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

Assessing the vulnerability of large heterogeneous systems is crucial to IT operational decisions such as prioritizing the deployment of security patches and enhanced monitoring. These assessments are based on various criteria, including (i) the NIST National Vulnerability Database which reports tens of thousands of vulnerabilities on individual components, with several thousand added every year, and (ii) the specifics of the enterprise IT infrastructure which includes many components. Defining and computing appropriate vulnerability metrics to support decision making remains a challenge. Currently, several IT organizations make use of the CVSS metrics that score vulnerabilities on individual components. CVSS does allow for environmental metrics, which are meant to capture the connectivity among the components; unfortunately, within Section 2.3 of [1] there are no guidelines for how these should be defined and, consequently, environmental metrics are rarely defined and used. We present a systematic approach to quantify and automatically compute the risk profile of an enterprise from information about individual vulnerabilities contained in CVSS scores. The metric we propose can be used as the CVSS environmental score. Our metric can be applied to the problem of prioritizing patches, customized to the connectivity of an enterprise. It can also be used to prioritize vulnerable components for purposes of enhanced monitoring.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFuture Challenges in Security and Privacy for Academia and Industry - 26th IFIP TC 11 International Information Security Conference, SEC 2011, Proceedings
Pages271-280
Number of pages10
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011

Publication series

NameIFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology
Volume354 AICT
ISSN (Print)1868-4238

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