Top-20 Weakest from Cybersecurity Elements of the Industry Production and Technology Platform 4.0 Information Systems

This work is dedicated to the issue of constructing secure information systems, which form the foundation of any industrial and technological platform within the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0). It addresses and solves the task of identifying weak elements in such systems at the design stage by leveraging accumulated data regarding vulnerabilities from the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). It reviews existing literature on the analysis of NVD content, highlighting a lack of suitable solutions. To tackle this issue, the paper proposes a method based on linguistic and statistical processing of vulnerability descriptions. This method includes several steps: downloading NVD vulnerabilities for each code, consolidating these vulnerabilities into a unified structure and preprocessing them, extracting descriptions and measures of their impact on information security threats (breaches of confidentiality, integrity, and availability), breaking down the descriptions into constituent elements of information systems and their post-processing, collecting statistics on word occurrence in descriptions and their impact on breaches, generating a top list of the most vulnerable elements, and saving the final results. A programmatic prototype implementation of the method (in Python) is described. An experiment is conducted to compile a Top-20 list of the most vulnerable elements of information systems, both in general and in terms of their impact on all three information security threats. The paper analyzes the four resulting lists, discusses the limitations of the conducted research and results, provides justifications, and indicates ways to overcome these limitations.