Network Vulnerability Analysis Using Text Mining

The research on network vulnerability analysis and management has gained increased attention during last decade since many studies have proved that combination of exploits is typical means to compromise a network system. This paper presents an intelligent method for analyzing and classifying vulnerabilities based on text mining technology. The proposed mechanism can automatically classify vulnerabilities into different predefined categories and obtain valuable information from abundant vulnerability texts. A series of experiments on 1060 new reported vulnerabilities in last three years by CERT are performed to demonstrate the efficiency of this mechanism. The results generated by this study can be applied to detecting multistage attack, correlating intrusion alerts, and generating attack graph.