The Likely Exploited Vulnerabilities (LEV) equations can help augment KEV- and EPSS-based remediation prioritization.

Researchers from CISA and NIST have proposed a new cybersecurity metric designed to calculate the likelihood that a vulnerability has been exploited in the wild.

Peter Mell of NIST and Jonathan Spring of CISA have published a paper describing equations for what they call Likely Exploited Vulnerabilities, or LEV.

Thousands of vulnerabilities are discovered every year in software and hardware, but only a small percentage are ever exploited in the wild.

Knowing which vulnerabilities have been exploited or predicting which flaws are likely to be exploited is important for organizations when trying to prioritize patching.

Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) lists such as the one maintained by CISA and the Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), which relies on data to estimate the probability that a vulnerability will be exploited, can be very useful. However, KEV lists may be incomplete and EPSS may be inaccurate.

LEV aims to enhance — not replace — KEV lists and EPSS. This is done through equations that take into account variables such as the first date when an EPSS score is available for a specified vulnerability, the date of the most recent KEV list update, inclusion in KEV, and the EPSS score for a given day (measured across multiple days).

LEV probabilities can be useful for measuring the expected number and proportion of vulnerabilities that threat actors have exploited.

It can also be useful for estimating the comprehensiveness of KEV lists. “Previously, KEV maintainers had no metric to demonstrate how close their list was to including all relevant vulnerabilities,” the researchers explained.

In addition, LEV probabilities can help augment KEV- and EPSS-based vulnerability remediation prioritization — in the case of KEV by identifying higher-probability vulnerabilities that may be missing, and in the case of EPSS by finding vulnerabilities that may be underscored.

While in theory LEV could turn out to be a very useful tool for vulnerability prioritization, the researchers pointed out that collaboration is necessary, and NIST is looking for industry partners “with relevant datasets to empirically measure the performance of LEV probabilities”.

The new algorithm will serve as a backup for the general encryption needed to protect data from quantum computers developed in the future

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the federal body that sets technology standards for governmental agencies, standards organizations, and private companies, has proposed barring some of the most vexing and nonsensical password requirements. Chief among them: mandatory resets, required or restricted use of certain characters, and the use of security questions.

NIST has formally published three post-quantum cryptography standards from the competition it held to develop cryptography able to withstand the anticipated quantum computing decryption of current asymmetric encryption.

Today, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the first standardization of three cryptography schemes that are immune against the threat of quantum computers, known as post-quantum cryptography (PQC) schemes. With these standards in hand, NIST is encouraging computer system administrators to begin transitioning as soon as possible.

NIST announced on Wednesday that it will be receiving outside help to get the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) back on track within the next few months.

The organization informed the cybersecurity community in February that it should expect delays in the analysis of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) identifiers in the NVD, saying that it was working to establish a consortium to improve the program.

Incident response is a critical part of cybersecurity risk management and should be integrated across organizational operations. The six Functions of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 all play vital roles in incident response.

NIST is releasing the initial public draft of Special Publication (SP) 800-61r3 (Revision 3), Incident Response Recommendations and Considerations for Cybersecurity Risk Management: A CSF 2.0 Community Profile, for public comment. This publication seeks to assist organizations with incorporating cybersecurity incident response recommendations and considerations throughout their cybersecurity risk management activities, as described by CSF 2.0. Doing so can help organizations prepare for incident responses, reduce the number and impact of incidents that occur, and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their incident detection, response, and recovery activities.

Anchore engineers are investigating why as of February 15, 2024, NIST has almost completely stopped updating NVD with analysis for CVE IDs.

Ce mardi 5 juillet 2022, l'organisme de normalisation étatsunien NIST a annoncé qu'il avait choisi les algorithmes de cryptographie post-quantiques qu'il allait maintenant normaliser. Ce sont Kyber pour l'échange de clés et Dilithium pour les signatures.