A Survey on Software Vulnerability Exploitability Assessment

Abstract

Knowing the exploitability and severity of software vulnerabilities helps practitioners prioritize vulnerability mitigation efforts. Researchers have proposed and evaluated many different exploitability assessment methods. The goal of this research is to assist practitioners and researchers in understanding existing methods for assessing vulnerability exploitability through a survey of exploitability assessment literature.  We identify three exploitability assessment approaches: assessments based on original, manual CVSS, automated Deterministic assessments, and automated Probabilistic assessments. Other than the original CVSS, the two most common subcategories are Deterministic, Program-State-Based, and Probabilistic Learning Model (LM) Assessments.