Comparison of Active Vulnerability Scanning vs. Passive Vulnerability Detection

Vulnerability analysis is an integral part of an overall security program. Through identifying known security flaws and weaknesses, vulnerability identification tools help security practitioners to remediate the existing vulnerabilities on the networks. Thus, it is crucial that the results of such tools are complete, accurate, timely and they produce vulnerability results with minimum or no side-effects on the networks. To achieve these goals, Active Vulnerability Scanning (AVS) or Passive Vulnerability Detection (PVD) approaches can be used by network-based vulnerability scanners. In this work, we evaluate these two approaches with respect to efficiency and effectiveness. For the effectiveness analysis, we compare these two approaches empirically on a test environment and evaluate their outcomes. According to total amount of accuracy and precision, the PVD results are higher than AVS. As a result of our analysis, we conclude that PVD returns more complete and accurate results with considerably shorter scanning periods and with no side-effects on networks, compared to the AVS.

I. Introduction

Vulnerability management is an indispensable component of an overall system security program that consists of a 4-step process: vulnerability identification, vulnerability verification, vulnerability assessment and vulnerability resolution.