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Security Vulnerability Information Service with Natural Language Query Support

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Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11483))

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Abstract

The huge data breaches and attacks reported in the past years (e.g., the cases of Yahoo and Equifax) have significantly raised the concerns on the security of software used and developed by companies for their day-to-day operations. In this context, becoming aware about existing security vulnerabilities and taking preventive actions is of paramount importance for security professionals to help keep software secure. The increasingly large number of vulnerabilities discovered every year and the scattered and heterogeneous nature of vulnerability-related information make this, however, a non-trivial task. This paper aims at mitigating this problem by making security vulnerability information timely available and easily searchable. We propose to enrich and index security vulnerability information collected from publicly available sources on the Web. To make this information easily queryable we propose a natural language interface that allows users to query this index using plain English. The evaluation results of our proposal demonstrate that our solution can effectively answer questions typically asked in the security vulnerability domain.

R. Nouri and K. Darabal—This work was done while the authors were at UNSW Sydney.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/694158.pdf.

  2. 2.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-equifax-cyber/equifax-breach-could-be-most-costly-in-corporate-history-idUSKCN1GE257.

  3. 3.

    https://pages.riskbasedsecurity.com/2017-ye-vulnerability-quickview-report.

  4. 4.

    https://www.riskbasedsecurity.com/2018/08/more-than-10000-vulnerabilities-disclosed-so-far-in-2018-over-3000-you-may-not-know-about/.

  5. 5.

    https://www.first.org/cvss/v2/guide.

  6. 6.

    https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/79.html.

  7. 7.

    https://nvd.nist.gov/products/cpe.

  8. 8.

    https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/relations.html.

  9. 9.

    https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/query-dsl.html.

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Acknowledgement

We acknowledge Data to Decisions CRC (D2D-CRC) for funding this research.

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Correspondence to Carlos Rodriguez .

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Rodriguez, C., Zamanirad, S., Nouri, R., Darabal, K., Benatallah, B., Al-Banna, M. (2019). Security Vulnerability Information Service with Natural Language Query Support. In: Giorgini, P., Weber, B. (eds) Advanced Information Systems Engineering. CAiSE 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11483. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21290-2_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21290-2_31

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