Visible to the public Comparison of Active Vulnerability Scanning vs. Passive Vulnerability Detection

TitleComparison of Active Vulnerability Scanning vs. Passive Vulnerability Detection
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2021
AuthorsEcik, Harun
Conference Name2021 International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology (ISCTURKEY)
Keywordsactive vulnerability scanning, compositionality, cryptography, fault diagnosis, Human Behavior, Information security, Metrics, passive vulnerability detection, pubcrawl, Resiliency, vulnerability detection
AbstractVulnerability analysis is an integral part of an overall security program. Through identifying known security flaws and weaknesses, vulnerability identification tools help security practitioners to remediate the existing vulnerabilities on the networks. Thus, it is crucial that the results of such tools are complete, accurate, timely and they produce vulnerability results with minimum or no side-effects on the networks. To achieve these goals, Active Vulnerability Scanning (AVS) or Passive Vulnerability Detection (PVD) approaches can be used by network-based vulnerability scanners. In this work, we evaluate these two approaches with respect to efficiency and effectiveness. For the effectiveness analysis, we compare these two approaches empirically on a test environment and evaluate their outcomes. According to total amount of accuracy and precision, the PVD results are higher than AVS. As a result of our analysis, we conclude that PVD returns more complete and accurate results with considerably shorter scanning periods and with no side-effects on networks, compared to the AVS.
DOI10.1109/ISCTURKEY53027.2021.9654331
Citation Keyecik_comparison_2021