What a future without CVEs means for cyber defense
The importance of the MITRE-run Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Program shouldn’t be understated. For 25 years, it has acted as the point of reference for cybersecurity professionals to understand and mitigate security flaws. By providing a standardized method for naming and cataloguing known vulnerabilities, it offers defenders a shared language for understanding, prioritizing, and responding to real-world threats.
The program has traditionally relied on US government funding to sustain operations and, unfortunately, and equivalent databases that operate on the same scale aren’t readily available. Thus, the decision from the US government to row back its guardianship of the program has been met with industry surprise and concern.
An 11-month extension of federal funding provides short-term relief but does little to alleviate the overall concerns about the long-term stability of a system that global cyber defense relies on.
With the future budget and management of the program in question, the security industry faces an uncomfortable question: how do we remain prepared and aligned without this critical piece of shared infrastructure?
Application of the CVE Program to training and readiness
For many cybersecurity professionals, the CVE program is the foundation for hands-on cybersecurity practice and crucial benchmarking of security preparedness.
Training exercises must be informed by real-world scenarios. The application of the CVE program helps to enhance crucial purple team training, with up-to-date attack simulations, focusing on known vulnerabilities, enhancing collaboration and response between red and blue teams. Ultimately, it ensures that teams are training against the most prevalent threats and continue to stay on top of evolving ones.
When the accuracy of the program is disrupted through categorization inconsistencies, delays or volatile funding, it has a ripple effect. Training scenarios can begin to lag. This means cybersecurity professionals fall behind and may not be able to access current insights of attacks, which can lead to outdated defense strategies and training.
Those blind spots will compound over time, compromising cyber teams’ and organizations’ cybersecurity readiness and their ability to defend against active threats. It means teams could unknowingly waste time by preparing for outdated threats whilst being unaware of current ones.
Apart from the risk, this places significant added time and resource pressure on cyber professionals working at the forefront of crises. This can potentially lead to decreased confidence within teams, who won’t feel well prepared for evolving attacks. It’s a snowball effect with huge repercussions for organizations and their employees.
The ripple effect across the cyber ecosystem
A broken or ineffective CVE program affects the entire business landscape. The benefit of the CVE program is that professionals from both smaller businesses as well as multinational corporations can access real-time notices around known vulnerabilities. Fragmented threat intelligence, delays in patching, and inconsistent communication across teams and organizations are all potential effects.
In critical sectors such as healthcare, finance, and energy, even a short delay in vulnerability response can mean the difference between a contained attack and a successful one. It also reduces the security of smaller vendors who may report in or provide services to larger enterprises.
Our recent research shows CISOs already being concerned about their ability to effectively manage a crisis. Any instability in the CVE system would only amplify those concerns and further weaken their preparedness.
CVEs enable security leaders to track trends, forecast the next batch of threats, and budget accordingly. Not only will single vulnerabilities get lost, but the context of them will go missing. It will be hard to keep track of where they’re found, how they work, and how they fit into other vulnerabilities in the ecosystem. The loss of transparency compromises both strategic planning and defensive posture.
Security built on trust and collaboration
The CVE system has always been a resource of trust and collaboration across the cybersecurity space. However, fundamental changes to the CVE system, whether it’s due to a lack of funding or reprioritization, risk the ability of blue teams to rely on the shared structure or insights. This can likely lead to fragmentations within sectors, and the wider industry – impacting the shared value of shared security posture and unified defense.
One security team might detect a weakness, another might have already started patching it, and a third might never even be aware it exists. This confusion would extend across borders, with businesses and government agencies in charge of critical national infrastructure left at different stages of awareness and response. Without a central system such as CVE, responses to threats become reactionary and scattered, ultimately putting businesses and individuals at risk.
Seeking alternatives, but not replacements
These uncertainties regarding the future of CVEs lead to questioning viable alternatives that could replace the program if it comes to it. Artificial intelligence, for instance, is a powerful tool; it can help to detect threats early and categorize them.
These capabilities could be employed as a stopgap, flagging and prioritizing new exploits even if official channels come to a halt.
But AI is no replacement. Sure, it can automate some parts of vulnerability management, but it cannot substitute for the human coordination, verification, and transparency provided by the CVE system. Algorithms cannot carry the weight of global threat communication alone. What is required is a solid, long-term commitment to the systems that do work and a stable governance model that will ensure resilience in the face of change.
Beyond AI, a group of experts and former members of the CVE Board established the CVE Foundation, a new nonprofit entity formed to carry on the operation of the program when the MITRE contract expires. The aim is to safeguard the CVE program and keep it accessible to the global security community in the long term.
While it’s still in its early days, the foundation’s emphasis on independence and continuity is a positive sign. It’s an opportunity to create something more durable, with governance that’s more representative of the international nature of today’s threats.
A call for stability
This current uncertainty around the CVE program should be a wake-up call. All shared cybersecurity infrastructure, whether CVEs, MITRE ATT&CK, or open threat intelligence platforms, should not be considered afterthoughts. They are critical to how professionals prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyber-attacks, and maintain an ongoing understanding of cybersecurity preparedness.
In an environment where attacks are becoming more sophisticated and frequent, compromising one of the industry’s fundamental systems is a significant gamble. What is needed now is a reaffirmation of long-term support – both financial and structural.
The US can maintain its position as a figurehead for the program, or the program can evolve, and shared funding and joint custodianship can take its place. Regardless, the priority must be staying on top of threats and being able to continuously upskill professionals and the next generation of defenders.