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Update 040_treesForVulMgmt.md (CERTCC#58)
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laurie-tyz authored Nov 2, 2020
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Expand Up @@ -56,7 +56,7 @@ Table 3: Proposed Meaning for Deployer Priority Outcomes
| Out-of-cycle | Act more quickly than usual to apply the fix out-of-cycle, during the next available opportunity, working overtime if necessary. |
| Immediate | Act immediately; focus all resources on applying the fix as quickly as possible, including, if necessary, pausing regular organization operations. |

### Scheduling Patches
### Coordinating Patches
In coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD), the available decision is whether or not to coordinate a vulnerability report. VRDA provides a starting point for a decision tree for this situation.<sup>23</sup> VRDA is likely adequate for national-level CSIRTs that do general CVD, but other CSIRT types may have different needs. Future work may elicit those types and make a few different decision options. Specialized coordination organizations exist (e.g., ICS-CERT, which conducts CVD for safety-critical systems). We have not developed a coordination tree in this work, but future work could use our principles and design techniques to refine and evaluate VRDA or some other decision tree for coordinated vulnerability disclosure. The CERT guide to CVD provides something similar for those deciding how to report and disclose vulnerabilities they have discovered [@householder2020cvd, section 6.10].

Within each setting, the decisions are a kind of equivalence class for priority. That is, if an organization must deploy patches for three vulnerabilities, and if these vulnerabilities are all assigned the *scheduled* priority, then the organization can decide which to deploy first. The priority is equivalent. This approach may feel uncomfortable since CVSS gives the appearance of a finer grained priority. CVSS appears to say, “Not just 4.0 to 6.9 is ‘medium’ severity, but 4.6 is more severe than 4.5.” However, as discussed previously (see page 4), CVSS is designed to be accurate only within +/- 0.5, and, in practice, is scored with errors of around +/- 1.5 to 2.5 [@allodi2018effect, see Figure 1]. An error of this magnitude is enough to make all of the “normal” range from 4.0 to 6.9 equivalent, because 5.5 +/- 1.5 is the range 4.0 to 7.0. Our proposal is an improvement over this approach. CVSS errors often cross decision boundaries; in other words, the error range often includes the transition between “high” and “critical” or “medium.” Since our approach keeps the decisions qualitatively defined, this fuzziness does not
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