Why it's So Hard to Triage Application Vulnerabilities?

Triaging CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) for cloud infrastructure has improved significantly, with many effective solutions in place like Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scanning, and other traditional runtime security tools. However, despite progress in infrastructure security, application-layer CVE triaging remains fundamentally broken.

Traditional Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools overwhelm application security (AppSec) teams with countless vulnerabilities. These tools fail to clearly distinguish which CVEs pose real, actionable risks versus theoretical or non-exploitable ones. This gap results in wasted time and resources on vulnerabilities that are mostly not relevant.

Security teams face 2 critical questions:

• Does this CVE pose a real risk in our production environment?
• Which vulnerabilities should we prioritize first?

Answering these questions is both crucial and challenging, especially given the high volume of CVEs, often hundreds per day, that teams must manage.

Four Key Reasons Application CVE Triaging is Harder Than Infrastructure CVE Triaging:

1. Complexity of Software Environments

• Dependency Chains: Modern applications depend on numerous third-party libraries and frameworks. A vulnerability in a dependency could affect your application indirectly, making accurate triaging difficult without understanding the full dependency chain.
• Custom Implementations: Applications frequently use custom code interacting uniquely with third-party libraries. Determining if and how a CVE impacts this custom implementation requires a deep understanding of the application's specific codebase.

2. Context-Specific Vulnerabilities

• Environment-Specific Factors: The risk posed by a CVE often depends heavily on specific configurations, runtime environments, operating system versions, and other deployment factors.
• Conditional Exploits: Many vulnerabilities are exploitable only under specific conditions. Without visibility into runtime execution, teams cannot accurately determine whether these conditions exist in their environment.

3. Interdisciplinary Knowledge Requirements

Effective triaging demands both security expertise and detailed application knowledge:

• Security Teams must understand vulnerability details, potential exploits, and mitigation strategies.
• Developers possess deep knowledge of how applications and components are implemented and configured. However, even senior developers often lack insight into runtime usage patterns, struggling to determine whether vulnerable functionalities are actively used.

This lack of runtime visibility leads to time-consuming, manual analysis. Security and development teams can spend days investigating a single CVE, severely impacting productivity.

4. Collaboration and Communication

• Differing Focus Areas: Security teams focus on identifying and mitigating risks, while developers prioritize functionality and performance.
• Detailed Cross-Team Analysis: Effective CVE analysis requires significant collaboration, with security and development teams working closely to assess vulnerabilities' actual relevance and impact.

Bridging these differing perspectives and priorities is challenging, often resulting in friction, delays, and misalignment.

The Solution: Function-Level Runtime Analysis

While cloud infrastructure CVE triaging has significantly improved, application-layer triaging remains an urgent, unsolved problem until now.

Raven solves application-layer CVE triaging by analyzing vulnerabilities at the function level at runtime. Instead of simply flagging package versions, Raven identifies whether vulnerable functions are actually executed or reachable in production. This targeted, precise approach allows AppSec teams to focus exclusively on genuinely exploitable risks, dramatically reducing noise and improving efficiency.

✅ Cloud infrastructure CVE triaging: Improved significantly
❌ Application-layer CVE triaging: Broken
💡 Raven: Fixes the problem by analyzing vulnerabilities at the function level in runtime.

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