In a move that nearly blindsided the cybersecurity community, the U.S. government came perilously close to allowing the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program to go dark. As the nonprofit steward of the system, MITRE was operating on borrowed time under an expiring contract, until a last-minute, 11-month reprieve was granted by CISA.

This wasn’t a mere procurement oversight. It was a high-visibility warning shot: our national cyber strategy is overly dependent on brittle infrastructure. The ripple effects from even a temporary CVE outage would disrupt the Department of Defense’s Zero Trust enforcement, AI-driven cyber platforms, and vulnerability management at scale.

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CVE: The Legacy Linchpin, But Not the Future

The CVE system has been the Rosetta Stone of vulnerability management for two decades. It provides the shared identifier that lets security tools, vendors, and analysts communicate across platforms. But while CVE has been foundational, it’s also fundamentally limited.

It was never designed for the velocity, complexity, or intelligence demands of today’s adversary landscape. CVE tells us what the vulnerability is, but not whether it’s being exploited, who’s using it, or how likely it is to become weaponized. It lacks context, real-time threat telemetry, and business-impact awareness. In short, CVE is necessary, but no longer sufficient.

The answer isn’t to sunset CVE overnight, that would be operational malpractice. But neither can we keep duct-taping a system built for 2005 to solve 2025’s threat model. The path forward is a phased transition toward a risk-aware, AI-compatible vulnerability intelligence model.

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Zero Trust with Zero Context?

The DoD’s Zero Trust architecture, mandated by Executive Order 14028 and codified in the DoD Zero Trust Strategy, depends on real-time context. CVE provides identity, not intent. It tells us a vulnerability exists but not whether it matters right now.

Without exploit likelihood models like EPSS, or platforms like Tenable’s VPR, Cisco/Kenna, or Qualys TruRisk, we’re flying blind in a world that demands precision. CVE-based systems assume that all “critical” vulnerabilities are equally dangerous. They aren’t. Only a fraction of CVEs are ever exploited in the wild, and attackers exploit what defenders overlook.

If CVE pauses, continuous assessment fractures, and Zero Trust enforcement logic, built on live trust scores, begins to rot. DoD mission owners lose visibility, and microsegmentation, conditional access, and SBOM verification begin to drift. That’s a risk no Zero Trust strategy can tolerate.

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AI Is Only as Smart as the Context It Ingests

AI is revolutionizing DoD cyber operations, from autonomous red teaming to automated threat triage. But these models are only as good as their inputs. And right now, those inputs are often CVE-tagged artifacts.

Disrupt CVE, and you degrade the performance of AI/ML-driven SOCs, CTEM platforms, and threat emulation engines that underpin modern cyber doctrine. Worse, without threat-centric enrichment like exploitability prediction, asset criticality, and attacker behavior modeling, AI models reinforce outdated triage logic.

To drive autonomy at mission speed, we must evolve from CVE alone to risk-based vulnerability intelligence pipelines that feed smart systems with smart data.

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The Real Threat: CVE as a Single Point of Failure

That a contract lapse could jeopardize CVE’s future exposes a structural fragility in how we treat critical cyber infrastructure. CVE is not a feature, it’s a dependency baked into national defense workflows, software supply chain verification, CMMC assessments, and Zero Trust implementations.

Yet we treat it like a cost center, funded by short-term contracts and subject to political budget cycles. That’s not just irresponsible. It’s negligent.

We need to decouple vulnerability intelligence from fragile procurement. That means a governance re-architecture, a consortium or foundation model with shared funding and oversight across the public and private sectors. MITRE lit the path, but we need to expand the runway.

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Evolve CVE, Don’t Entrench It

At Adapt Forward, we recognize that vulnerability identification is just one pillar of cyber defense. What we need now is a generational leap, from CVE to contextual, risk-based, threat-aware vulnerability intelligence. That means integrating:

• AI/ML-driven exploit prediction models like EPSS, VPR, and Kenna

• Business-impact-aware scoring based on asset criticality and mission impact

• Dynamic enrichment from threat intelligence, attacker behavior, and real-time telemetry

• Standardization efforts that support automated machine-speed decisioning in Zero Trust and CTEM architectures

CVE got us here, but it won’t get us there. We must treat it as a foundational layer, not a complete system. The real priority is building what comes next.

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