• Shivam Maurya
• April 13, 2024
• No Comments

This is the scoring system that assigns rankings to cybersecurity vulnerabilities in terms of their severity. While CVSS v3 has had industry leadership for years, it did not take long before CVSS v4 came into being as an attempt to fill in some of the gaps left in version one.

Expanded Metrics

• CVSS v4 provides new indicators, like CIAC, which stands for Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, and Exploitability, Requirements and Security, enhancing the overall assessment of the vulnerability.
• Furthermore, these supplementary inputs can be used to pinpoint the possible hazards that a loophole may consequently be exposed to, enabling the security team to adopt a more rational risk management policy.

Improved Granularity

• The CVSS v4 offers a more refined grading that extends from 0.0 to 10.0 for each of the individual metrics compared to the binary approach adopted in the previous version (CVSS v3).
• Such granular approach is aimed to bring an evaluation process featuring more distinctions, thereby allowing security teams to have a goal-oriented remediation process.

Enhanced Contextual Awareness

• CVSS v4 considers the context in which a vulnerability is occurring, for instance the targets environment, the attackers skillset, whether there are any mitigation procedures.
• Having this foresight helps organizations to realize the real impact of vulnerabilities on the real world which in turn reflects on the choices they make in terms of solving the different problems.

Simplified Scoring Model

• CVSS v4 became the simplified version of the scoring model, so it could be more comprehensible for the security experts to understand and judge the outcomes.
• The most notable change is the introduction of the new scoring scheme which provides easily relatable labels like “Low,” “Medium,” “High,” and “Critical,” for the severity levels that interested parties without technical background can understand clearly its risk level.

The journey from CVSS v3 to CVSS v4 signifies a significant change in how cybersecurity vulnerabilities are assessed and ranked. Through addressing drawbacks in its predecessor and introducing new metrics coupled with a contextual approach, CVSS V4 aims at providing security teams with a much more comprehensive tool that can enable them to effectively manage their company’s cybersecurity risks.