Towards More Practical Automation of Vulnerability Assessment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is increasingly suggested to identify emerging software vulnerabilities (SVs) through relevant development activities (e.g., issue reports) to allow early warnings to open source software (OSS) users. However, the support for the following assessment of the detected SVs has not yet been explored. SV assessment characterizes the detected SVs to prioritize limited remediation resources on the critical ones. To fill this gap, we aim to enable early vulnerability assessment based on SV-related issue reports (SIR). Besides, we observe the following concerns of the existing assessment techniques: 1) the assessment output lacks rationale and practical value; 2) the associations between Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) metrics have been ignored; 3) insufficient evaluation scenarios and metrics. We address these concerns to enhance the practicality of our proposed early vulnerability assessment approach (namely proEVA). Specifically, based on the observation of strong associations between CVSS metrics, we propose a prompt-based model to exploit such relations for CVSS metrics prediction. Moreover, we design a curriculum-learning (CL) schedule to guide the model better learn such hidden associations during training. Aside from the standard classification metrics adopted in existing works, we propose two severity-aware metrics to provide a more comprehensive evaluation regarding the prioritization of the high-severe SVs. Experimental results show that proEVA significantly outperforms the baselines in both types of metrics. We further discuss the transferability of the prediction model regarding the upgrade of the assessment system, an important yet overlooked evaluation scenario in existing works. The results verify that proEVA is more efficient and flexible in migrating to different assessment systems.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".