Modeling Vulnerability Discovery and Patching with Fixing Lag

Abstract

Development of Secure Software was always a tedious task for IT industry. The insecurity issue of the software systems can be looked as two primary problems: vulnerability discovery and patching. Vulnerability discovery modeling tends to develop mathematical models that predict the behavior of vulnerabilities in a software system and patches are used to fix the vulnerabilities. In this work we are proposing a new approach to model vulnerability by categorizing them into two types (direct and indirect) based on how they are fixed by utilizing the vulnerability patching phenomenon with delay called lag time while fixing them after discovery. Numerical Illustration on a real life vulnerability data is provided to validate the proposed model.