New Approaches of Multi-agent Vulnerability Scanning Process

There are various scanners used to determine the actual vulnerabilities, to measure their criticality level and the overall security level of the information infrastructure. These scanners have the same functionality and scanning principles. That is why the existing vulnerability scanning process has significant problems such as the necessary network modifications, the validity of infrastructure information and the complexity and unclarity of the scanning results. This paper provides new solutions to these problems. Also, the vulnerability scanner classification is described and related works were overviewed. The scanning process phases were analyzed and three main problems were identified. Authors compared vulnerability scanners by specially formulated criteria for the purpose of solving these problems. The unique sequence generation technique for multi-agent scanning and the unified scanning strategy are proposed as the new approaches for vulnerability scanning process. The necessity of new vulnerability assessment method is proposed which takes into account network environment of scanned hosts.