Cybersecurity CVE CWE

CVE VS CWE

Pallavi Vishwakarma

Member of Technical staff

Dec 27 2022

3 min reading

CVE VS CWE
Figure 1

What is CVE?

 

CVE stands for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures and has to do with the specific instance within a product or system—not the underlying flaw.

 

The National Cybersecurity FFRDC (Federally Funded Research and Development Center), run by the MITRE Corporation, is responsible for managing and maintaining CVE, which was first released in 1999. CVE is freely usable and open to the public.

 

In order to compare security products and services and to make it simpler to link information from vulnerability databases, the CVE list was created. Each vulnerability and exposure has a unique CVE Identifier, which is listed in the CVE database.

 

Which Vulnerability Qualify for a CVE?

 

Vulnerabilities must fulfill a specific set of requirements in order to be designated as CVE vulnerabilities. 

 

These standards consist of:

 
  1. Independent of other issues
  2. Acknowledged by the vendor
  3. Is a proven risk
  4. Affecting one codebase
 

How to Lookup Information in the CVE Database

 

Every vulnerability listed in the CVE database is given a unique serial number with the format CVE-YYYY-NNNN, where YYYY stands for the year it was released and NNNN stands for a sequential number (in principle this number only has four digits, but it can be increased to five or more digits when needed). For instance, the 2022 SQL injection issue in a database stored function in TrueConf Server was given the serial number CVE-2022-46763.

 

Anyone can visit the website https://cve.mitre.org, click the search link, and download a list of all vulnerabilities listed in their database.

 

Example:

 

Top Vulnerabilities of 2022:

 

Vulnerability

CVE

Log4Shell

CVE-2021-44228

Follina

CVE-2022-30190

Spring4Shell

CVE-2022-22965

Google Chrome Zero-Day

CVE-2022-0609

F5 BIG-IP

CVE-2022-1388

 

Benefits:

 
  • CVE makes it easier to share information about known vulnerabilities so that cybersecurity plans can be updated with the most recent security flaws and security concerns.
 
  • CVE numbers allow organizations to determine what each tool covers and whether it is suitable for their needs.
 
  • Information about CVE vulnerabilities can be used by security advisories to look up known attack signatures and pinpoint specific vulnerability exploits.
 

What is CWE?

 

CWE stands for Common Weakness Enumeration and has to do with the vulnerability—not the instance within a product or system.

 

CWE is a community-developed list of typical software security flaws that serve as a baseline for attempts to identify, mitigate, and prevent weaknesses. It also serves as a common language and standard for software security tools.

 

Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE), which is aimed at both the development community and the community of security practitioners, is a formal list or dictionary of typical software and hardware weaknesses that can appear in architecture, design, code, or implementation and result in exploitable security vulnerabilities.

 

Example:

 

Top CWE weakness of 2022:

 

ID

Name

Score

CWE-787

Out-of-bounds Write

64.20

CWE-79

Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')

45.97

CWE-89

Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an SQL Command ('SQL Injection')

22.11

CWE-20

Improper Input Validation

20.63

CWE-125

Out-of-bounds Read

17.67

 

Benefits:

 
  • CWE enables programmers to reduce vulnerabilities as early in the lifecycle as possible, enhancing the security of their product as a whole.
 
  • CWE helps reduce risk industry-wide by enabling more effective community discussion about finding and mitigating these weaknesses in existing software and hardware and reducing them in future updates and releases.
 
  • Organizations can utilize CWE to describe, pick, and employ security products and services more effectively in order to identify these flaws and lower their risk right away.
 

Relationship between CWE and CVE

 

When MITRE published the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE®) List in early 1999, it started focusing on the problem of classifying software flaws. Beginning in 2005, MITRE's CVE Team created a preliminary classification and categorization of vulnerabilities, attacks, flaws, and other concepts as part of constructing CVE to aid in defining typical software weaknesses. These groups, while adequate for CVE, were too arbitrary to be used to identify and classify the functionality provided within the products offered by the code security assessment sector. To help meet these extra needs, the CWE List was established in 2006.



 

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