Empirical Risk Assessment in Major Graphical Design Software Systems

Abstract

Security vulnerabilities have been reported in major design software systems such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, which are recognized as <italic>de facto</italic> standard design tools in most of the design industries. Companies need to evaluate and manage their risk levels posed by those vulnerabilities, so that they could mitigate the potential security bridges in advance. In general, security vulnerabilities are discovered throughout their life cycles repeatedly if software systems are continually used. Hence, in this study, we empirically analyze risk levels for the three major graphical design software systems, namely Photoshop, Illustrator and GIMP with respect to a software vulnerability discovery model. The analysis reveals that the Alhazmi-Malaiya Logistic model tends to describe the vulnerability discovery patterns significantly. This indicates that the vulnerability discovery model makes it possible to predict vulnerability discovery in advance for the software systems. Also, we found that none of the examined vulnerabilities requires even a single authentication step for successful attacks, which suggests that adding an authentication process in software systems dramatically reduce the probability of exploitations. The analysis also discloses that, for all the three software systems, the predictions with evenly distributed and daily based datasets perform better than the estimations with the datasets of vulnerability reporting dates only. The observed outcome from the analysis allows software development managers to prepare proactively for a hostile environment by deploying necessary resources before the expected time of vulnerability discovery. In addition, it can periodically remind designers who use the software systems to be aware of security risk, related to their digital work environments.