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Empirical Studies on Vulnerabilities

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The following material is under construction, and immature.

Terms and Concepts

There are many definitions of vulnerability out there in both academic and industry world. Here are some of them:

A vulnerability is

"An error or weakness in design, implementation, or operation"
"A specific flaw or oversight in a piece of software (or program) that allows attackers to do something malicious, expose or alter sensitive information"
"A weakness in a system that can be exploited to violate the system's intended behavior. There may be security, integrity, availability, and other vulnerabilities"
"An internal fault that enables an external fault to harm the system"
"A flaw or defect in a technology or its deployment that produces an exploitable weakness in a system, resulting in behavior that has security or survivability implications"
"An instance of [a mistake] in the specification, development, or configuration of software such that its execution can violate the [explicit or implicit] security policy"

In industry, vulnerability is defined as

Security holes/bugs are faults, defects, or programming errors. These may be exploited by unauthorized users to access computer networks or web servers from the Internet. Secpoint
A security vulnerability is a flaw in a product that makes it infeasible – even when using the product properly — to prevent an attacker from usurping privileges on the user's system, regulating its operation, compromising data on it, or assuming ungranted trust. Microsoft