A Systematic Framework for Evaluating Vulnerability Reports

Open source maintainers receive numerous vulnerability reports of varying quality, and efficiently filtering them is crucial for effective security response. This article presents systematic principles—borrowed from legal reasoning—to quickly evaluate whether a vulnerability report has merit: it must have a proper threat model, realistic attacker assumptions, and actual impact in real usage scenarios. By applying these filtering frameworks, security teams can focus limited resources on genuine vulnerabilities rather than wasting time on invalid claims.