Automated Vulnerability Management of Computer Systems

With the continuous flood of vulnerabilities of computer systems, vulnerability management is a very important task for administrators to keep systems as secure as possible. However current manual vulnerability management by administrators is very time-consuming and error-prone. This paper proposes an open framework of automated vulnerability management that dramatically alleviates the burden of administrators and improves the security of systems. In this framework, all of the vulnerability information and system information is expressed using XML to support automatic processing. A Host Vulnerability Manager (HVM) running on the target host maintains the crucial system information, decide what vulnerabilities exist according to the system information and vulnerability information from various sources and try to fix them automatically. The domain vulnerability manager (DVM) is responsible for the vulnerability management of the local network. DVM correlates reports from HVMs and scan for network-based vulnerabilities in this domain. We have implemented a prototype of the framework that shows the effectiveness and efficiency of the solution. Key-Words: XML, system security, vulnerability management, vulnerability assessment, automated patching