Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Bring the guide's usage of "remediation" into line with common usage #6

Closed
6 tasks
ahouseholder opened this issue Oct 23, 2020 · 1 comment
Closed
6 tasks
Assignees
Labels
bug Something isn't working

Comments

@ahouseholder
Copy link
Collaborator

ahouseholder commented Oct 23, 2020

We currently use "remediation" in the guide to mean both fix and mitigate.
For example, see section 4.4 Remediation
But other sources use remediation to mean something disjoint from mitigation.

  • The first question to address is whether we are the outlier or not.
  • The second question is to suggest how the guide can identify, define, and consistently use terms representing:
  • (1) "fix", "patch" (noun) - a complete elimination of the vulnerability
  • (2) "mitigation", "partial fix", "workaround" (noun) - a reduction in risk (either impact OR probability) posed by the vulnerability that does not meet the criteria for (1)
  • (3) "remediation" (noun) An umbrella term for the set of both (1) and (2) (noun) - any action taken in response to the existence of a vulnerability that decreases associated risk (possibly to zero)
  • (4) "vulnerability response" (noun) - An umbrella term for things that one does in response to the existence of a vulnerability, regardless whether it affects the associated risk or not

The list above reflects current usage in the guide, but depending on whether or not we use "remediation" to mean 1 or 3, then any of these may need to change.

References to the "remediation = fix (only)" usage include:

  1. https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/DD/issuances/dodi/853101p.pdf?ver=2020-09-15-143058-347
  2. https://blog.rapid7.com/2020/09/14/vulnerability-remediation-vs-mitigation-whats-the-difference/

This issue is closely related to SSVC#46

@ahouseholder ahouseholder added the bug Something isn't working label Oct 23, 2020
@ahouseholder ahouseholder self-assigned this Oct 23, 2020
@ahouseholder
Copy link
Collaborator Author

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
bug Something isn't working
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

1 participant