SMET: Semantic Mapping of CVE to ATT&CK and its Application to Cyber Security

Published

July 12, 2023

Author(s)

Abdeen Basel, Ehab Al-Sheer, Anoop Singhal, Latifur Khan, Kevin Hamlen

Abstract

Cybercriminals relentlessly pursue vulnerabilities across cyberspace to exploit software, threatening the security of individuals, organizations, and governments. Although security teams strive to establish defense measures to thwart attackers, the complexity of cyber defense and the magnitude of existing threats exceed the capacity of defenders. Therefore, MITRE took the initiative and introduced multiple frameworks to facilitate vital knowledge sharing of vulnerabilities, attack, and defense information. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) and ATT&CK Matrix are two significant MITRE endeavors. CVE facilitates sharing publicly discovered vulnerabilities while ATT&CK collects and categorizes adversaries' Tactic, Techniques, and Procedures (TTP) and recommends appropriate countermeasures. As CVE yields a low-level description of the vulnerability, ATT&CK can complement CVE by providing more insights into it from an attacking perspective, aiding defenders to counter any exploitation attempt. Unfortunately, due to the complexity of this mapping and the rapid growth of these frameworks, mapping CVE to ATT&CK is a daunting and time-intensive undertaking that overwhelms even experts. Multiple studies proposed models that automatically achieve this mapping. However, due to their reliance on annotated datasets, these models exhibit limitations in quality and coverage and fail to justify their decisions. To overcome these challenges, we present SMET, a tool that automatically maps CVE entries to ATT&CK techniques based on their textual similarity. SMET achieves this mapping by leveraging ATT&CK BERT, a model that we trained using the SIAMESE network to learn semantic similarity among attack actions. In inference, SMET utilizes semantic extraction, ATT&CK BERT, and a logistic regression model to map CVE entries to ATT&CK techniques. As a result, SMET demonstrated superior performance compared to other state-of-the-art models.

Proceedings Title

DBSec 2023: Data and Applications Security and Privacy XXXVII

Volume

13942

Conference Dates

July 19-21, 2023

Conference Location

Sophia Antopolis, FR

Conference Title

IFIP International Conference on Data Application Security and Privacy (DBSEC 2023)

Pub Type

Conferences

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37586-6_15

Local Download

Keywords

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, CVE, ATT&CK, SMET

Citation

Basel, A. , Al-Sheer, E. , Singhal, A. , Khan, L. and Hamlen, K. (2023), SMET: Semantic Mapping of CVE to ATT&CK and its Application to Cyber Security, DBSec 2023: Data and Applications Security and Privacy XXXVII, Sophia Antopolis, FR, [online], https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37586-6_15, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=936761 (Accessed May 2, 2024)