Why the World's Vulnerability Index Cannot Keep Up
4 minute read time
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) system has been called the backbone of modern cybersecurity. For decades, it's been the shared language connecting scanners, advisories, compliance frameworks, and government policy.
But as software accelerates, and AI takes a seat in the SDLC, that backbone is beginning to crack.
Sonatype's recent analysis of open source vulnerabilities disclosed in 2025 reveals a troubling truth: the data the world depends on to make security decisions is increasingly incomplete, inconsistent, and out of date.
A Growing Disconnect Between Data and Reality
The CVE program and its companion, the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), were designed to standardize vulnerability tracking, not as real-time intelligence systems.
Today, they're stretched to the breaking point.
Sonatype's 2025 research found widespread delays, inconsistent scoring, and missing data that leave teams guessing at severity and prioritization.
These findings are further detailed in our new report, "Trust Issues: The CVE Crisis," a data-backed examination of how the global vulnerability ecosystem reached this point, and what must change.
Coverage Is Collapsing
The most fundamental problem is coverage. Nearly two-thirds of open source CVEs in 2025 had no severity score at all. Without that baseline, security teams are flying blind and forced to guess at prioritization or assume the worst. Thousands of real security risks are ignored or deprioritized simply because there’s no data to rank them.
In AI-driven development, that gap becomes even more dangerous. LLMs and coding agents now rely on CVE data to make security recommendations, from dependency selection to automated patching. When foundational data is incomplete, these models inherit and amplify the same blind spots as human teams.
Accuracy Is Unreliable
Even when CVEs are scored, those scores often can't be trusted.
When defenders operate on stale or incomplete data, the impact is immediate:
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Wasted developer time chasing false positives.
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Unaddressed real threats hidden in false negatives.
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Compliance blind spots in SBOM and audit reporting.
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A widening exploit window between disclosure and verified intelligence.
The result is false confidence — a dangerous belief that "official" data equals accurate data. In reality, timeliness and accuracy have become the new battlegrounds of vulnerability management.
The Real-World Impact: False Confidence
When defenders operate on stale or incomplete data, the fallout is immediate:
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Productivity risk: Developers spend cycles on false positives instead of innovation.
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Operational risk: Real threats go unaddressed, impacting uptime and resilience.
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Compliance risk: SBOM frameworks and audits assume CVE completeness often falsely.
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Strategic risk: The longer the lag in accurate data, the larger the exposure window.
High-profile incidents like Log4Shell and XZ Utils showed how quickly open source communities can outpace the official vulnerability pipeline.
Why Publicly Sourced Data Falls Short
The CVE system is built on collaboration, but also on compromise.
Researchers and maintainers share advisories with good intentions, but incentives are misaligned. Researchers earn credit for disclosure, not accuracy. Maintainers prioritize fixes over refining metadata, making accuracy optional.
The result is a paradox: a global vulnerability index built on community trust, now eroding that same trust through inconsistency.
Beyond Indexing: The Path Forward
CVE and NVD are essential but need a redefined purpose. They were made to name vulnerabilities, not explain them. And they were never designed for open source at the scale we know it today.
Organizations should consider a multi-source, context-rich intelligence model that combines CVE identifiers with real-time data and automated correlation.
That means:
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Moving from static CVE listings to package-level detection.
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Using ecosystem-aware scoring that reflects real exploit activity.
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Correlating data automatically across advisories, commits, and active exploits.
This shift — from indexing to intelligence — is how modern defenders will stay ahead.
Bottom Line
The CVE system is not broken. It's just out of sync with reality. Built for consistency, not completeness, it can no longer sustain the velocity of today's AI-driven software ecosystem.
As the current MITRE-U.S. government contract approaches its 2026 renewal, the industry faces a critical inflection point. The choice is not whether to keep CVE, but whether to modernize around it.
Download our full whitepaper to learn more.
Aaron is a technical writer on Sonatype's Marketing team. He works at a crossroads of technical writing, developer advocacy, software development, and open source. He aims to get developers and non-technical collaborators to work well together via experimentation, feedback, and iteration so they ...
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