An Independent Validation of Vulnerability Discovery Models
Having a precise vulnerability discovery model (VDM) would
provide a useful quantitative insight to assess software secu-
rity. Thus far, several models have been proposed with some
evidence supporting their goodness-of-t.
In this work we describe an independent validation of the
applicability of six existing VDMs in seventeen releases of
the three popular browsers Firefox, Google Chrome and In-
ternet Explorer. We have collected ve dierent kinds of
data sets based on dierent denitions of a vulnerability.
We introduce two quantitative metrics, goodness-of-t en-
tropy and goodness-of-t quality, to analyze the impact of
vulnerability data sets to the stability as well as quality of
VDMs in the software life cycles.
The experiment result shows that the\conrmed-by-vendors'
advisories" data sets apparently yields more stable and bet-
ter results for VDMs. And the performance of the s-shape
logistic model (AML) seems to be superior performance in
overall. Meanwhile, Anderson thermodynamic model (AT)
is indeed not suitable for modeling the vulnerability dis-
covery process. This means that the discovery process of
vulnerabilities and normal bugs are dierent because the in-
terests of people in nding security vulnerabilities are more
than nding normal programming bugs.