Beyond the Surface: An NLP-based Methodology to Automatically Estimate CVE Relevance for CAPEC Attack Patterns

Abstract: Threat analysis is continuously growing in importance due to the always-increasing complexity and frequency of cyber attacks. Analyzing threats demands significant effort from security experts, leading to delays in the security analysis process. Different cybersecurity knowledge bases are currently available to support this task but manual efforts are often required to correlate such heterogenous sources into a unified view that would enable a more comprehensive assessment. To address this gap, we propose a methodology leveraging NLP to effectively and efficiently associate Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE) vulnerabilities with Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC) attack patterns. The proposed technique combines semantic similarity with keyword analysis to improve the accuracy of association estimations. Experimental evaluations demonstrate superior performance compared to state-of-the-art models, reducing manual effort and analysis time, and enabling cybersecurity professionals to prioritize critical tasks.