Cybersecurity Information Sharing: Analysing an Email Corpus of Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure

Abstract

Information sharing is widely held to improve cybersecurity outcomes whether its driven by market forces or by cooperation among xC;firms and individuals. Formal institutions may be established to facilitate cooperative information sharing. This paper presents a case-study of such an institution, the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC), and provides quantitative insights based on the meta data of 434Kemails passing through CERT/CC since 1993. Our longitudinal results show how the volume and proportion of emails about different products and vendors has varied over time. We also analyse the distributions of information sharing volume, participation, and duration across 46K vulnerabilities. Finally, we run regressions to understand how the volume of information sharing and decision to coordinate vary based on properties of the vulnerability and the affected vendors. Wediscuss what has changed, the appropriateness of a competitive or cooperative framing, and limitations.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 28, 2021
Accession Number
AD1146811

Entities

People

  • Allen Householder
  • Daniel W. Woods
  • Jonathan Spring
  • Kiran Sridhar

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Cyber

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Case Studies
  • Commerce
  • Cyber Threats
  • Cybersecurity
  • Databases
  • Department Of Homeland Security
  • Economic Models
  • Economics
  • Electronic Mail
  • Engineering
  • Information Science
  • Information Security
  • National Security
  • Operating Systems
  • Software Development
  • Supply Chain
  • Vulnerability

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Cybersecurity.
  • International Relations and European Studies

Technology Areas

  • Cyber