What Happens If CVE Funding Ends? The Backbone of Vulnerability Disclosure Is Under Threat
- Anup Ghosh
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
The Download
The CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) system is the global backbone for tracking publicly known cybersecurity vulnerabilities. It provides standardized identifiers (like CVE-2024-4040) that are essential for vulnerability coordination, public disclosure, and patch prioritization. Recently, members of the community—including major contributors like MITRE—have raised alarms over potential changes or uncertainty in U.S. government funding for the CVE program.
If CVE funding stalls or diminishes:
Fewer vulnerabilities could be cataloged in a timely manner, delaying critical updates across ecosystems.
Vendor and researcher coordination may degrade, especially among open-source projects and SMBs without dedicated security resources.
Security tools (SIEMs, scanners, patch managers)Â that rely on CVE references could lose accuracy or effectiveness.
Threat intelligence sharing could splinter, leading to inconsistent naming and classification across tools and reports.
What IT and Security Teams Should Do
Even if CVE operations slow or change form, security teams must prepare to rely more on alternative sources of vulnerability intelligence:
Augment CVE feeds with vendor-specific advisories, NVD (National Vulnerability Database), and commercial intelligence feeds (like CISA KEV, VulnDB, or OSV.dev).
Invest in internal asset and vulnerability correlation tools that don’t solely depend on CVEs.
Encourage vendors to continue disclosure transparency even outside the CVE system.
Consider contributing to or monitoring community-driven initiatives that may rise to fill gaps in disclosure or classification (e.g., OpenSSF efforts).
At ThreatMate we are sourcing multiple providers of vulnerability information and will monitor the situation closely. We believe maintaining funding for MITRE's CVE initiative is in the interest of national security and strongly support continued funding. Yanking the funding last minute with no advanced warning will likely lead to major vulnerability holes in networks with little recourse.
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