Reachability analysis is a security technique used to determine whether a vulnerability within a system, application, or cloud environment is accessible and exploitable from a given source. By evaluating the paths through which an attacker could potentially reach a vulnerable component, reachability analysis helps prioritize remediation efforts by focusing on vulnerabilities that pose actual risks.
In modern cloud-native architectures, where applications are composed of numerous interconnected services and components, understanding which vulnerabilities are truly reachable is essential for effective risk management and resource allocation.
What is reachability analysis?
Reachability analysis involves assessing the pathways through which data or execution flows can reach vulnerable parts of a system. This assessment considers various factors, including network configurations, access controls, application logic, and runtime behaviors. The goal is to distinguish between vulnerabilities that are theoretically present and those that are practically exploitable in the current environment.
For instance, a known vulnerability in a library might exist within an application’s codebase. However, if the specific function containing the vulnerability is never invoked during the application’s execution, the risk of exploitation is significantly reduced. Reachability analysis identifies such scenarios, enabling security teams to focus on vulnerabilities that are both present and exploitable.
Why reachability analysis matters
Traditional vulnerability management approaches often rely on static analysis and severity scores, such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), to prioritize remediation efforts. However, these methods can lead to alert fatigue by flagging numerous vulnerabilities without considering their exploitability in the specific context of the application.
Reachability analysis addresses this issue by:
- Reducing false positives by filtering out vulnerabilities that are not exploitable in the current environment
- Prioritizing real risks by highlighting vulnerabilities that are both present and reachable
- Optimizing resource allocation by allowing teams to focus on issues that pose genuine threats
- Enhancing compliance by providing evidence-based assessments that support regulatory requirements
By integrating reachability analysis into the vulnerability management process, organizations can improve their security posture while minimizing unnecessary workload.
Traditional approaches to reachability analysis
Most pre-production supply chain analysis and code scanning tools generate a dependency tree and identify direct and transitive dependencies with associated CVEs. While helpful, this produces a large volume of alerts and leaves teams overwhelmed with little guidance on what truly needs to be addressed.
Some Software Composition Analysis (SCA) solutions attempt to improve prioritization by determining whether vulnerable packages are referenced in the code and whether the specific vulnerable function is invoked. Although this adds useful context, it still leaves a major question unanswered: is the vulnerable package actually exploited in production? These approaches operate with limited visibility and do not reflect real-world execution.
Runtime analysis offers more accurate answers, but traditional agent-based solutions have their own challenges. Agents are difficult to deploy and maintain, consume system resources, and typically only provide visibility into the host they’re deployed on. This leads to fragmented insights and only partial coverage of dynamic reachability across workloads.
The result: most organizations are still left asking, “What vulnerable components are actually reachable and exploitable in my live environment—at scale?”
Static vs. dynamic reachability analysis
Reachability analysis can be performed using static or dynamic methods:
Static reachability analysis examines the codebase without executing the application. It analyzes the application’s structure, control flow, and data flow to identify potential paths to vulnerable components. Static analysis is often used in pre-production environments to identify issues during development. However, most static reachability analysis tools are limited to build-time contexts and cannot account for runtime behaviors or environment-specific configurations that exist in production.
Dynamic reachability analysis involves monitoring the application during execution to observe actual runtime behavior. This provides more accurate insights into which parts of the code are executed and how services interact in real time. Historically, dynamic analysis has required resource-intensive, agent-based instrumentation that is difficult to deploy at scale and often degrades performance.
Today, emerging solutions are addressing these limitations. Lightweight, eBPF-based technologies can now capture runtime behavior with minimal overhead, making dynamic reachability analysis more practical in live production environments. Additionally, agentless approaches are now available that allow teams to perform reachability analysis without installing software on individual workloads, enabling broader adoption across cloud environments.
More organizations are beginning to combine agentless and lightweight dynamic reachability analysis methods to provide the most complete and real-time understanding of which vulnerabilities are truly reachable and exploitable.
Reachability analysis in cloud environments
In cloud-native environments, applications often consist of microservices, containers, and serverless functions distributed across various platforms. This complexity introduces challenges in understanding how vulnerabilities can be exploited.
Reachability analysis in cloud environments involves:
- Assessing network configurations, including security groups, firewall rules, and routing tables
- Analyzing identity and access management (IAM) policies and role assumptions
- Monitoring runtime behaviors of workloads and services to track real execution paths
- Evaluating inter-service communications in container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes
This multifaceted approach helps teams determine how threats might move laterally, exploit privileges, or reach sensitive data.
Benefits of reachability analysis
Implementing reachability analysis offers several advantages:
- Improved risk prioritization focused on exploitable vulnerabilities
- Reduced alert fatigue by filtering out unreachable findings
- Enhanced operational efficiency through smarter resource allocation
- Stronger alignment with zero trust and least privilege principles
- Faster, evidence-based incident response and compliance reporting
By focusing security efforts on reachable vulnerabilities, organizations can reduce exposure and improve cloud resilience.
How Orca Security helps
The Orca Cloud Security Platform performs Agentless and Dynamic Reachability Analysis to help organizations focus on vulnerabilities that are exploitable within their actual cloud environments.
Through its combination of static and dynamic techniques, including lightweight runtime telemetry, Orca:
- Identifies which vulnerabilities are reachable and exploitable by attackers in production environments
- Reduces cloud vulnerabilities by 90%
- Enhances vulnerability prioritization and remediation
- Combines reachability findings with other cloud context to give teams the most holistic and accurate view of risk
With Orca, security teams gain actionable visibility into what’s truly at risk—not just what’s theoretically vulnerable.
