The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) is the U.S. government’s official repository of publicly known cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the NVD provides detailed information about Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), including severity scores, impact metrics, and links to relevant resources.
The NVD is an essential source of vulnerability intelligence for security teams, developers, and compliance professionals. It supports vulnerability management, risk assessment, patch prioritization, and regulatory reporting across all sectors of industry and government.
What is the National Vulnerability Database?
The National Vulnerability Database is a publicly accessible, curated database that catalogs software vulnerabilities using data primarily sourced from the CVE program. While CVE entries provide basic identifiers and descriptions of vulnerabilities, the NVD enriches that data with additional context and metadata such as:
- Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) metrics
- Affected software and versions
- Vulnerability types and attack vectors
- Impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability
- Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) mappings
- References to advisories, patches, and vendor statements
Each entry in the NVD is indexed by its CVE identifier (e.g., CVE-2023-12345), which makes it easy to integrate into automated security tools and patch management systems.
Why the NVD matters
The NVD plays a critical role in global cybersecurity by providing a standardized and authoritative source of vulnerability data. Its importance lies in:
- Providing structure and consistency: NVD data adheres to defined standards (e.g., CVSS, CPE, CWE), enabling consistent risk assessment and remediation
- Supporting automation: Security tools and vulnerability scanners often pull data from the NVD to evaluate software risks in real time
- Enabling prioritization: CVSS scores and exploitability metrics help security teams focus on vulnerabilities that pose the highest risk
- Enhancing transparency: Publicly documenting vulnerabilities holds vendors accountable and supports coordinated disclosure
Assisting compliance: Organizations subject to regulations like FISMA, FedRAMP, or NIST 800-53 use the NVD to guide patching and vulnerability response
For any organization managing a modern software or cloud environment, the NVD provides foundational intelligence to guide secure operations.
How the NVD works
The NVD workflow begins when a vulnerability is identified and assigned a CVE ID by a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA), such as a software vendor or open-source project. Once the CVE is published, NIST ingests it and enriches it with structured data before publishing it to the NVD.
NVD entries typically include:
- CVE ID: A unique identifier assigned through the CVE program
- Base CVSS score: Reflects the severity of the vulnerability on a scale from 0.0 to 10.0
- Temporal and environmental CVSS metrics: Provide insight into exploit maturity, remediation level, and potential impact in a specific context
- CPE (Common Platform Enumeration): Identifies the affected software, hardware, and operating systems
- CWE: Indicates the underlying weakness category that enabled the vulnerability (e.g., buffer overflow, input validation failure)
- References: Links to patches, advisories, and security bulletins
This enriched dataset enables organizations to conduct deeper analysis, correlate vulnerabilities across systems, and inform decision-making.
NVD and CVSS scoring
One of the most important features of the NVD is its use of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) to rate the severity of vulnerabilities. CVSS scores include:
- Base score: Measures the fundamental characteristics of the vulnerability (e.g., attack vector, impact)
- Temporal score: Reflects changes over time, such as the availability of exploits or mitigations
- Environmental score: Accounts for the specific context of an affected organization
These scores guide remediation timelines, risk assessments, and compliance thresholds. For example:
- CVSS 9.0–10.0 = Critical
- CVSS 7.0–8.9 = High
- CVSS 4.0–6.9 = Medium
- CVSS 0.1–3.9 = Low
Security teams often use these ratings in service-level agreements (SLAs) for patching and incident response.
Limitations of the NVD
Despite its widespread use and value, the NVD has some limitations:
- Lag time: There may be a delay between when a CVE is published and when its corresponding NVD entry is enriched and available
- Inconsistent depth: Not all entries have complete or consistent metadata, especially for newly disclosed or obscure vulnerabilities
- Focus on known vulnerabilities: The NVD does not address unknown (zero-day) vulnerabilities or threat actor behavior
- Static scoring: CVSS scores are calculated at the time of publication and may not reflect real-time exploitability or contextual risk
For these reasons, many organizations supplement NVD data with commercial threat intelligence or contextual analysis tools that account for exploit availability, asset exposure, and business impact.
Use of the NVD in cloud and DevOps environments
In cloud-native and DevOps-driven organizations, the NVD plays a central role in:
- Software composition analysis (SCA): Mapping CVEs to open-source dependencies and container images
- CI/CD pipeline security: Blocking builds or deployments that contain critical vulnerabilities
- Cloud workload protection: Identifying vulnerabilities in virtual machines, containers, and serverless functions
- SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) tracking: Comparing declared components against the NVD for vulnerability exposure
- Vulnerability management: Creating prioritized patch lists and dashboards using NVD CVSS scores
Integrating NVD data into development pipelines and runtime environments enables faster detection, prioritization, and remediation of risk.
How Orca Security uses NVD
The Orca Cloud Security Platform leverages data from the National Vulnerability Database, as well as more than 20 other vulnerability data sources, to detect and prioritize vulnerabilities across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Kubernetes environments.
With Orca, organizations can:
- Automatically detect vulnerabilities in cloud assets and prioritize using a comprehensive and dynamic analysis of criticality
- Analyze vulnerabilities holistically and in the context of other cloud assets and risks to surface critical attack paths
- Leverage AI-driven features to accelerate remediation and fix issues before attackers can exploit them
- Achieve and sustain multi-cloud compliance with regulations and industry standards with an extensive library of built-in and customizable frameworks
Orca enables security teams to enhance their Vulnerability Management programs and effectively secure cloud-native environments.
