What is vulnerability management lifecycle?
The vulnerability management lifecycle is a continuous, often automated process. It finds, analyzes, prioritizes, and mitigates security vulnerabilities in embedded and IoT systems.
It follows four key steps:
- Vulnerability detection
- Analysis and prioritization
- Remediation
- Reporting
This cycle is not a one-time task, it’s a routine, daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on your system’s criticality and your cybersecurity policies.
The goal is simple: reduce the time window during which security vulnerability can be exploited.
Why does vulnerability management matter?
A strong vulnerability management lifecycle brings real benefits:
- It improves your cybersecurity posture.
- It helps you comply with regulations like the CRA.
- It ensures your team focuses on the most critical issues.
In short, it helps you keep secure, reliable embedded systems.
The 4 steps of vulnerability management lifecycle
Once you have created your list of embedded systems you need to scan and assess for vulnerabilities, you’re ready to go. Let’s break down the four steps of this cycle.
Step 1: Vulnerability scanning
Everything starts with visibility. You can’t fix what you don’t know.
Begin by generating a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM). This is a complete inventory of all packages and dependencies in your system. Use standard formats like SPDX or CycloneDX. These formats ensure compatibility with most scanning tools.
Once your SBOM is ready, software composition analysis (SCA) tools, like CVEScan, will come in handy to detect vulnerabilities. They’ll help you automatically compare your system inventory with public CVE databases like NVD and OSV. The result is a detailed list of known vulnerabilities affecting your embedded system.
You can automate this process. You can also schedule scans based on your needs. Daily for critical systems. Weekly or monthly for others. Knowing that, the more frequent the scan, the smaller the attack window. Read our article on vulnerability management plan.
Step 2: Assessment and prioritization
Now that you have a list of vulnerabilities, it’s time to make sense of it.
Start by assessing the severity of each CVE. Use CVSS scores, exploitability, and business impact to guide your decisions. If you’ve done a risk assessment before, use it now. It helps you filter out false positives and focus on real threats.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools are also useful here. They help you sort and filter vulnerabilities by criticality. But be careful, open-source tools often generate a lot of noise while proprietary tools usually offer better filtering capabilities and thus, fewer false positives.
Some tools like CVEScan also support manual annotations. You can tag teammates, add comments, and track decisions. This makes collaboration easier and avoids rework.
At the end of this step, you’ll have a clean, prioritized list of vulnerabilities. You’ll know what to fix and what to ignore.
Step 3: Remediation
Apply patches or workarounds for the vulnerabilities you’ve prioritized. Use vendor patches when available. If no patch exists, decide whether to mitigate the risk or accept it temporarily.
Vulnerability scanners can help here too by showing you if a patch is available and linking directly to it. Some of them even help you identify if the same CVE affects multiple systems and patch them together. This saves time and ensures consistency.
Mitigate vs remediate in cyber security
Remediation means completely resolving a security vulnerability (typically by installing a patch, updating firmware, or redesigning a system component to eliminate the issue). This ensures embedded systems are no longer exposed to that cyber risk.
Mitigation, on the other hand, involves putting temporary safeguards in place (like isolating affected modules, limiting access, or adding monitoring) to lessen the likelihood or impact of CVE exploitation, even though the vulnerability itself isn’t removed. Mitigation is often the best path when remediation isn’t immediately possible due to hardware limitations or operational constraints.
Step 4: Vulnerability reporting
Reporting is not just for compliance. It’s also a tool for monitoring and continuous improvement.
Generate reports that show:
- What vulnerabilities were found
- What actions were taken
- What issues are still open
- How your security posture is evolving
Use dashboards to track progress across teams and systems. Share reports with stakeholders. Use the insights to refine your scanning and patching strategy.
Good reporting closes the loop. It also prepares you for security audits and regulatory checks.
Read more: The 4 steps to monitor Linux CVE.
Usual challenges
In practice, implementing this lifecycle isn’t always smooth. R&D teams often face real-world constraints that slow down or complicate the process.
- Resources constraints & skill gaps: Many teams don’t have enough cybersecurity experts to review every alert or manage complex patching schedules. This leads to delays and missed security vulnerabilities. Automating tasks and training embedded software engineers on security basics can help. Some organizations also rely on managed services with companies like Witekio to fill the gap.
- Rollout delays: Even when a patch is available, teams hesitate to apply it quickly. They fear it might break production. This hesitation gives attackers more time to exploit known issues. One solution could be to build fast, reliable testing environments. This builds confidence and speeds up patch deployment.
- Irregular scanning: Threat actors move fast. If you scan only once a quarter, you might miss critical vulnerabilities for weeks. Daily or weekly scans are more effective. They help you catch issues early and reduce exposure.
- Integration with DevOps tools: If your vulnerability data isn’t connected to your CI/CD pipeline, software developers may never see it. Integrating CVE monitoring tools with platforms like GitLab ensures that remediation becomes part of the development workflow.
Using CVEScan to support your vulnerability management lifecycle
CVEScan is purpose-built to support every stage of the vulnerability management lifecycle for embedded systems based on Yocto, Zephyr, Buildroot, and more.
From generating detailed SBOMs to detecting CVEs across public databases, it automates the detection phase with precision.
Its integrated analysis tools allow R&D teams to manually annotate vulnerabilities, filter out false positives, and collaborate across projects ensuring that prioritization is both correct and efficient.
When it comes to remediation, CVEScan finds available patches and links them directly, even combining patching tasks across embedded platforms to save time.
Finally, its reporting dashboards offer clear visibility into security activities across your device fleet, making it a complete, scalable solution for teams managing complex and evolving device ecosystems.
