Development of a host vulnerability checking tool and data analysis of host vulnerabilities

Abstract

Vulnerabilities can be classified based on their location as application vulnerabilities, network vulnerabilities and host vulnerabilities. This thesis focuses on host vulnerabilities and can be divided in two parts. The first part describes Ferret, a new tool developed for checking host vulnerabilities. Ferret helps system administrators by quickly finding vulnerabilities that are present on a host. It is designed and implemented in a modular way: a different plug-in module is used for a specific vulnerability checked, and each possible output format is specified by a plug-in module. Ferret is freely available open-source software implemented in Perl. The second part of the thesis talks about the data analysis of host vulnerabilities. This exercise was conducted on two sets of data collected extensively for the purpose to understand how host vulnerabilities are evolving over a period of time.