Making the Case for Cybersecurity
5 VULNERABILITY CHARACTERIZATION IN RICK-CENTRIC DEVSECOPS
As the risk claim and risk measurement depends on systematically identifying vulnerabilities, how can we avoid being reactive and falling behind the attackers?
In contemporary cybersecurity practice, vulnerability knowledge is ubiquitous, but often superficial. Tools and databases offer long lists of known issues but rarely provide the systemspecific context needed to prioritize or understand them as part of a broader assurance strategy. Within a risk-centric DevSecOps pipeline vulnerabilities must be treated not as isolated flaws, but as contextual relationships between contextualized attacks, defenses, and system-specific design choices.
At its core, a vulnerability is a situational condition— an imbalance when a tailored attack intersects with an insufficient or absent defense.
To support automation and continuous reasoning, vulnerability conditions must be formally characterized. Consider the objects depicted in Figure 5-1. Vulnerability Condition object is represented as a tuple < target, vulnerability category >. Allocated control object that is associated with the mitigation claim, is represented as a tuple < target, control type, vulnerability category >. Finally, the vulnerability finding object is represented as a tuple < target, vulnerability category, vulnerability finding category, vulnerability finding >.
These objects are linked directly to the rest of the risk claim structure, allowing them to serve as structured, inferable evidence within the assurance case. A vulnerability category is aligned with the attack characteristics < technical impact category, attack type, attacker category > and supply chain artifact characteristics < artifact category, artifact >. Thus, a vulnerability condition is a profile of an attack – representing the necessary conditions of attack’ s success.
The completeness claim of vulnerability condition enumeration depends heavily on the selection of vulnerability category and their aligned with the community’ s understanding of vulnerabilities and mitigating controls.
Journal of Innovation 49