VulCPE: Context-Aware Cybersecurity Vulnerability Retrieval and Management

TL;DR

VulCPE is a framework that improves cybersecurity vulnerability retrieval by standardizing data, modeling configuration dependencies, and leveraging context-aware techniques, resulting in higher precision and coverage.

Contribution

It introduces a unified CPE schema and graph-based modeling to enhance vulnerability retrieval accuracy and address data inconsistencies in existing databases.

Findings

Achieves a retrieval precision of 0.766

Achieves a coverage of 0.926

Addresses over 50% vendor name inconsistencies

Abstract

The dynamic landscape of cybersecurity demands precise and scalable solutions for vulnerability management in heterogeneous systems, where configuration-specific vulnerabilities are often misidentified due to inconsistent data in databases like the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Inaccurate Common Platform Enumeration (CPE) data in NVD further leads to false positives and incomplete vulnerability retrieval. Informed by our systematic analysis of CPE and CVEdeails data, revealing more than 50% vendor name inconsistencies, we propose VulCPE, a framework that standardizes data and models configuration dependencies using a unified CPE schema (uCPE), entity recognition, relation extraction, and graph-based modeling. VulCPE achieves superior retrieval precision (0.766) and coverage (0.926) over existing tools. VulCPE ensures precise, context-aware vulnerability management, enhancing cyber resilience.