Base: Exploitabilty Metrics
The Exploitability metrics reflect the characteristics of the thing that is vulnerable, which we refer to formally as the vulnerable component.
Attack Vector
This metric reflects the context by which vulnerability exploitation is possible.
The vulnerable component is not bound to the network stack and the attacker’s path is via read/write/execute capabilities.
Attack Complexity
This metric describes the conditions beyond the attacker’s control that must exist in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Specialized access conditions or extenuating circumstances do not exist. An attacker can expect repeatable success when attacking the vulnerable component.
Privileges Required
This metric describes the level of privileges an attacker must possess before successfully exploiting the vulnerability.
The attacker requires privileges that provide basic user capabilities that could normally affect only settings and files owned by a user. Alternatively, an attacker with Low privileges has the ability to access only non-sensitive resources.
User Interaction
This metric captures the requirement for a human user, other than the attacker, to participate in the successful compromise of the vulnerable component.
The vulnerable system can be exploited without interaction from any user.
Base: Scope Metrics
The Scope metric captures whether a vulnerability in one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Scope
Formally, a security authority is a mechanism (e.g., an application, an operating system, firmware, a sandbox environment) that defines and enforces access control in terms of how certain subjects/actors (e.g., human users, processes) can access certain restricted objects/resources (e.g., files, CPU, memory) in a controlled manner. All the subjects and objects under the jurisdiction of a single security authority are considered to be under one security scope. If a vulnerability in a vulnerable component can affect a component which is in a different security scope than the vulnerable component, a Scope change occurs. Intuitively, whenever the impact of a vulnerability breaches a security/trust boundary and impacts components outside the security scope in which vulnerable component resides, a Scope change occurs.
An exploited vulnerability can only affect resources managed by the same security authority. In this case, the vulnerable component and the impacted component are either the same, or both are managed by the same security authority.
Base: Impact Metrics
The Impact metrics capture the effects of a successfully exploited vulnerability on the component that suffers the worst outcome that is most directly and predictably associated with the attack. Analysts should constrain impacts to a reasonable, final outcome which they are confident an attacker is able to achieve.
Confidentiality Impact
This metric measures the impact to the confidentiality of the information resources managed by a software component due to a successfully exploited vulnerability.
There is no loss of confidentiality within the impacted component.
Integrity Impact
This metric measures the impact to integrity of a successfully exploited vulnerability. Integrity refers to the trustworthiness and veracity of information.
There is no loss of integrity within the impacted component.
Availability Impact
This metric measures the impact to the availability of the impacted component resulting from a successfully exploited vulnerability.
There is a total loss of availability, resulting in the attacker being able to fully deny access to resources in the impacted component; this loss is either sustained (while the attacker continues to deliver the attack) or persistent (the condition persists even after the attack has completed). Alternatively, the attacker has the ability to deny some availability, but the loss of availability presents a direct, serious consequence to the impacted component (e.g., the attacker cannot disrupt existing connections, but can prevent new connections; the attacker can repeatedly exploit a vulnerability that, in each instance of a successful attack, leaks a only small amount of memory, but after repeated exploitation causes a service to become completely unavailable).
Temporal Metrics
The Temporal metrics measure the current state of exploit techniques or code availability, the existence of any patches or workarounds, or the confidence in the description of a vulnerability.
Environmental Metrics
These metrics enable the analyst to customize the CVSS score depending on the importance of the affected IT asset to a user’s organization, measured in terms of Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability.