Industry, too, has a host of competing pressures for knowing what the government will do with the information it has found about a known exploit.
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Government retention of vulnerabilities in software means more federal power to potentially commit expansive searches of personal data normally understood to be private and non-accessible. Law enforcement has a decidedly mixed record respecting legal and normative lines on what it collects, collates, and retains on the activities of the citizenry. It’s dicey: Decisions on disclosure matter for protecting both the privacy and civil liberties of the American people. critical infrastructure or individual personal data open to attack because those same exploits often are available on the black market at the same time governments discover them.Ĭlosing an exploit could mean losing an opportunity to break into the communications of an extremist organization plotting violence in the homeland, or the chance to listen in on the secret communications of a hostile foreign power targeting our military personnel overseas. Holding onto exploits can be a boon to intelligence, law enforcement, and defense communities who might be able to use these vulnerabilities to penetrate adversary networks or track criminal organizations.ĭisclosing or holding on to vulnerabilities carries a host of direct and unintended consequences. Disclosing vulnerabilities gives industry the chance to fix holes in its software and reduce the exploit space for hackers and ransomware attackers.
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government’s process for determining when and how to disclose unknown cyber vulnerabilities to relevant companies or withhold them for government purposes. In a recent report, we suggest a host of fixes needed to improve the VEP. But the VEP process is so shrouded in secrecy that there is no public scrutiny to ensure decisions adequately weigh all security and non-security equities necessary for our democracy.Ĭongress and the Biden administration play important roles in increasing public confidence that the VEP threads the needle of maintaining security and protecting our liberties. The VEP could help prevent a Colonial Pipeline shutdown from happening or let it occur to learn more about perpetrators bent on disrupting the U.S.
Known as the Vulnerabilities Equities Process, or VEP, this bureaucratic-sounding process is complex and consequential. government entity that examines cyber holes and decides whether they should be fixed, monitored or exploited. To tell or not to tell? That is the question facing a little-known, highly secretive U.S.
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