Comment by lmeyerov

We're talking about different things. I agree CVE ratings and risk/severity/etc levels in general for third party libraries are awkward. I don't have a solution there. That does not mean we should stop reporting and tracking C+I+A violations - they're neutral, specific, and useful.

Risk, severity, etc are careful terms that are typically defined contextually relative to the application... yet CVEs do want some sort of prioritization level reported too for usability reasons, so it feels shoe-horned. Those words are useful in operational context where a team can prioritize based on them, and agreed, a third-party rating must be reinterpreted for the application's rating. CVE ratings is an area where it seems "something is better than nothing", and I don't think about it enough to have an opinion on what would be better.

Conversely, saying a library has a public method with an information flow leak is a statement that we can compositionally track (e.g., dataflow analysis). It's useful info that lets us stand on the shoulders of giants.

FWIW, in an age of LLMs, both kinds of information will be getting even more accessible and practical for many more people. I can imagine flipping my view on risk/severity to being more useful as the LLM can do the compositional reasoning in places the automated symbolic analyzers cannot.