Vulnerability Response Summit

• Vulnerability Response Summit is a focused gathering that facilitates the exchange of best practices for coordinated vulnerability management and disclosure.
• Summit sessions cover pragmatic topics such as standardized toolchains, rapid mitigation techniques, and regulatory compliance like CRA and NIS2.
• Participants generate actionable recommendations through mixed formats, advanced surveys, and collaborative discussions under Chatham House rules.

A Vulnerability Response Summit is a focused gathering of stakeholders—practitioners, researchers, industry, and policymakers—dedicated to the challenges and advancements in software vulnerability response, disclosure, and management. Recent summits serve as platforms for knowledge exchange, distillation of emerging practices, and reaction to shifting regulatory and threat landscapes in the software supply chain, vulnerability prioritization, and disclosure processes (Rotthaler et al., 2 Dec 2025).

1. Summit Structure, Goals, and Participant Composition

The 2025 S3C2-SICP Vulnerability Response Summit exemplifies contemporary summit design: a multi-institutional event combining academic, industrial, and regulatory participants. Objectives include fostering frank discussion regarding daily practice, regulatory requirements (e.g., Cyber Resilience Act [CRA], NIS2), organizational structures, technical toolchains, and coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) (Rotthaler et al., 2 Dec 2025).

• Format: Advance surveys select panel topics reflecting real-world pain points, followed by keynote, panel, and open discussion sessions under Chatham House Rules.
• Participants: A mix of nine company practitioners (diverse in sector and product maturity) and six academic researchers, ensuring a blend of practical and analytical perspectives.
• Outputs: Summaries and actionable recommendations are co-developed and vetted for factual accuracy by all participants.

2. Core Themes in Vulnerability Reporting and Management

Summit panels address end-to-end vulnerability management from intake to remediation and disclosure:

• Reporting Channels: All participating organizations endorse a single, low-barrier contact point (e.g., ‘security@’). Efficient intake and escalation are anchored in internal governance (CISO, PSIRT), with ISO 27001 and IEC 62443 cited as structural backbones (Rotthaler et al., 2 Dec 2025).
• Disclosure Evolution: Movement from concealment toward transparency is evident; publication of advisories, when direct notification is infeasible, is increasingly standard.
• Response Cycles: A 90-day window (acknowledgment to public advisory) is the prevailing target, with multiple “active” vulnerabilities considered normal under new regulatory regimes.

Outstanding Issues: Balancing B2B and B2C notification, identifying staff with both product and security domain expertise, and moving from highly manual triage to conceptual automation remain open questions.

3. Toolchains: Discovery, Prioritization, and Automation

Tool usage and standardization is a principal summit agenda:

• Discovery Tools: “After-build” vulnerability scanners predominate; continuous scanning of custom code is rare. SBOMs (using SPDX or CycloneDX formats) and Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange (VEX) are emerging as interoperability standards for communicating risk at the component level.
• Prioritization Algorithms: Manual triage (CVSS scoring plus context/exploitability) is the norm. Automation is stymied by excessive false positives and fragmentation in output formats (Rotthaler et al., 2 Dec 2025).
• Exploit Prediction Models: EPSS v3 (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is highlighted as state of the art—a community-driven, daily-updated probability score for CVE exploitation, leveraging 1,477 features in an XGBoost model. At its optimal F₁ threshold (probability ≥ 0.36), the model achieves 67.8% recall and 78.5% precision on truly exploited CVEs, far exceeding static CVSS base scores (AUPR = 0.780 vs. 0.051) (Jacobs et al., 2023).

Integration Guidance: Best practice is incorporating EPSS into remediation workflow—mapping asset inventories, selecting score thresholds based on patch capacity, and aggregating asset risk via the formula

$$P(\text{any exploit}) = 1 - \prod_{i=1}^n (1 - p_i)$$

where $p_i$ are EPSS scores for each CVE on an asset.

4. Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure: Processes and Metrics

Effective CVD processes are shown to drive higher response and remediation rates. Key findings from field studies include:

• Policy Impact: Dutch municipalities with a CVD policy reached 54.5% response rate and 40.9% remediation, compared to 27.3% and 29.5% without (χ² test $p = 0.01$ for response; $p = 0.15$ for resolution). Belgian public-sector entities show rates near zero under equivalent measurement (Hove et al., 2023).
• Time to Response and Remediation: Median first response is 12 days, with a long tail up to 90 days.
• Persistent Vulnerability: Even with a policy, ~59% of reported vulnerabilities remain unremediated after 90 days.

Barriers: Inaccessible or nonfunctional contact points (e.g., security.txt, unmonitored addresses), excessive gating by CSIRTs, third-party process obstacles (NDAs), and privacy-intrusive data requests for reporters are recurring obstacles.

Recommendations:

• Publish ISO 29147:2018-compliant CVD policies and a monitored security.txt.
• Limit required reporter data to minimal contact fields.
• Implement structured tracking (date_received, date_acknowledged, date_resolved, etc.) for all CVD workflows.
• Establish enforcement mechanisms (e.g., audit, certification linkage) for public entities.

5. Regulatory Environment: CRA, NIS2, Standards Harmonization

Summits serve as focal points for interpreting, preparing for, and implementing new regulatory requirements:

• CRA/NIS2 Readiness: ISO 27001–compliant organizations report comparative readiness. Uncertainty remains regarding product classification and legal obligations, especially for small/medium enterprises.
• Operational Mandates: CRA imposes responsibilities “up the supply chain,” requiring complete SBOM traceability, 24-hour incident notification to ENISA, and post-market security monitoring (Rotthaler et al., 2 Dec 2025).
• Harmonization Strategies: Mapping existing security standards (ISO/IEC frameworks) to evolving regulatory clauses, assembling cross-functional teams, and early training/engagement with external bodies (Fraunhofer, ENISA) are recommended mitigations.

6. Advancements in Rapid Vulnerability Mitigation

Summit discussions surface algorithmic and workflow innovations for “pre-patch” risk reduction:

• Security Workarounds for Rapid Response (SWRRs): Automated instrumentation (as realized in Talos) redirects vulnerable function execution to existing in-program error handlers, rapidly neutralizing 75.1% of all potential vulnerabilities with only 1.3% average performance impact. Effective coverage ($E = 0.751 \times 0.713 \approx 53.5\%$) doubles that of previous configuration workaround approaches (Huang et al., 2017).
• Key Operational Principles: SWRRs leverage minimal developer input, introduce no new executable paths outside documented error handlers, and can be generated for new vulnerabilities in minutes—enabling organizations to “buy time” for patch development.
• Limitations: SWRRs depend on robust error-handling paths and may be ineffective for hot-path or essential functions.

7. Emerging Practices, Challenges, and Takeaways

Persisting issues include manual triage burden, tool sprawl, format fragmentation, and shortage of personnel with overlapping product and security domain expertise.

Actionable summit-derived best practices:

Recommendation	Scope	Supporting Data
Centralize and publicize a security contact	Org./Industry-wide	(Hove et al., 2023, Rotthaler et al., 2 Dec 2025)
Implement formal governance for response	Org./PSIRT, CISO	(Rotthaler et al., 2 Dec 2025)
Standardize tooling and SBOM formats	Technical, Interoperab.	(Rotthaler et al., 2 Dec 2025, Jacobs et al., 2023)
Integrate exploit prediction scoring (e.g., EPSS)	Risk Management	(Jacobs et al., 2023)
Automate rapid mitigation via SWRRs	Technical workflow	(Huang et al., 2017)
Prepare for regulatory harmonization	Legal, Process	(Rotthaler et al., 2 Dec 2025)
Measure and refine response metrics	Continuous improvement	(Hove et al., 2023)

Summits emphasize continuous improvement by recording, disambiguating, and refining key metrics (fix times, triage accuracy, response rates), and by fostering knowledge exchange between diverse actors facing shared challenges. A plausible implication is that future Vulnerability Response Summits will increasingly prioritize harmonization across toolchains, regulatory frameworks, and rapid mitigation technologies, grounded in systematic measurement and transparent reporting.