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Towards a "Periodic Table" of Bugs

Published

Author(s)

Irena Bojanova

Abstract

Our vision for a "periodic table" of bugs is a "natural" organization of a catalog or dictionary or taxonomy to describe software weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Such an organization will help the community to: a) more closely explain the nature of vulnerabilities (e.g. Heartbleed, Shellshock, Ghost, Chrome WebCore, etc.) and eventually detect, mitigate, or prevent them b) more closely describe the classes of weaknesses that tools warnings cover (e.g. buffer overflow, injection, etc.) c) eliminate the need for an exhaustive Cartesian product of weakness classes as in CWEs [1]. It may also help: d) predict new classes of weaknesses and vulnerabilities e) improve existing classifications.
Citation
Bugs Framework (BF)

Keywords

Bug, Classification, Security, Taxonomy, Vulnerability, Weakness

Citation

Bojanova, I. (2015), Towards a "Periodic Table" of Bugs, Bugs Framework (BF), [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=957119, https://usnistgov.github.io/BF/ (Accessed March 29, 2024)
Created April 8, 2015, Updated December 8, 2023