The examination of vulnerabilities is vital to network security, and finding the route to the flaw's source is essential for the analysis and mitigation of software vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. The automation of secure software development can be easily achieved by using vulnerability ID. Prior to this, manually tagged communications with vulnerability ID was a laborious process that had scalability problems and room for human mistakes. To facilitate code examination, several vulnerability detection techniques have been developed and to support code inspection, several vulnerability detection techniques have been developed. A series of research that uses machine learning approaches and provide encouraging outcomes are among these strategies. This chapter discusses recent research trend that uses deep learning to identify vulnerabilities and demonstrates how cutting-edge neural approaches are used to identify potentially problematic code patterns. It also highlights a few publications from research that have analyzed vulnerability identification using deep learning.
TopIntroduction
For securing the network from attacks, discernment and perusal of software vulnerabilities have become an important aspects. Now, what is meant by discernment and perusal? The word discernment means identifying the vulnerabilities and understanding the weaknesses in the network, that could be exploited by the attacker. This process involves various activities like scanning of the network, reviewing the code, and security testing, whereas perusal means, once vulnerabilities are identified, they need to be thoroughly examined to access the impact and the potential risk. This process includes vulnerability prioritization and verification and risk mitigation. To maintain network security, a productive Vulnerability Management Framework (VMF) (Chhillar and Shrivastava, 2021) has become essential. A network’s vulnerabilities keep growing quickly, thus they must be remedied quickly and effectively. Identification, classification, prioritization, repair, and mitigation of vulnerabilities in a network are all part of the cyclical Network Vulnerability Management (NVM) process. Vulnerability scanners are used to find and classify vulnerabilities. Networks, programs, and machines may all be accessed by vulnerability scanners to check for known flaws. A router, application server, firewall, web server, and other assets are only a few examples of the types of assets whose programming flaws or incorrect configurations can make a network vulnerable.
The network’s security policy may be changed, patches can be installed, and users can be informed about network security and software reconfiguration to help mitigate vulnerabilities. VM discovers flaws in a network and assesses the threat posed by those vulnerabilities. This assessment also aids in reducing or eliminating flaws. A bug must be fixed as quickly as possible so that the threat involved gets reduced. VM is a more inclusive word than vulnerability scanning. Along with vulnerability scanning, VM also takes into account, factors like risk assessment, vulnerability repair, and so on. The concept of Vulnerability Management process and Vulnerability Scanning have been discussed below.
Vulnerability Management Process
A traditional management method has become essential to guarantee the network’s security. Everyone is aware that vulnerabilities are constantly expanding and come in so many different forms that it is hard to address them manually. Thus, the network requires an automated administration method that is well-planned and step-by- step. The foremost goal of this procedure is to quickly identify and address that vulnerability. To keep track of vulnerabilities and to guarantee the veracity and integrity of data in a network, periodic network scanning is required. The stages of the vulnerability management process are defined in Figure 1. The initial stage identifies the software or hardware assets using automation. Once the assets have been discovered, categorizing and classifying those assets is the next important step. Thereafter, analysis of scanned results is performed on the basis of asset criticality, its cvss score, and vulnerability threat. In the next step, vulnerabilities are prioritized and fixed on the basis of their business risk and severity level. In the end, verify if the threats have been eliminated or not.
Figure 1. Vulnerability management process