Estimating the assessment difficulty of CVSS environmental metrics: An experiment

[Context] The CVSS framework provides several dimensions to score vulnerabilities. The environmental metrics allow security analysts to downgrade or upgrade vulnerability scores based on a company’s computing environments and security requirements. [Question] How difficult is for a human assessor to change the CVSS environmental score due to changes in security requirements (let alone technical configurations) for PCI-DSS compliance for networks and systems vulnerabilities of different type? [Results] A controlled experiment with 29 MSc students shows that given a segmented network it is significantly more difficult to apply the CVSS scoring guidelines on security requirements with respect to a flat network layout, both before and after the network has been changed to meet the PCI-DSS security requirements. The network configuration also impact the correctness of vulnerabilities assessment at system level but not at application level. [Contribution] This paper is the first attempt to e...