The Cybersecurity Gap Starts April 16th, 2025
There’s no way to sugar coat this; it’s bad.
As of April 16, 2025, the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program — the global standard for identifying and tracking
cybersecurity vulnerabilities — will no longer be funded by the U.S. federal government. This news, confirmed by MITRE Corporation, marks a serious inflection point for software security, infrastructure resilience, and global vulnerability coordination. We don’t have anything ready to take its place.
For over two decades, the CVE system has provided a shared language and authoritative catalog of security flaws. It is trusted by national governments, private companies, open-source communities, and international standards bodies. It ensures that when a critical vulnerability is discovered, everyone — from cloud providers to cybersecurity researchers to DevSecOps engineers — refers to the same identifier, the same metadata, and the same remediation timeline.
That system has now been destabilized, not by a cyberattack but by budgetary neglect.
If you don’t understand how serious this could be, let’s here it from MITRE directly, “If a break in service were to occur, we anticipate multiple impacts to CVE, including deterioration of national vulnerability databases and advisories, tool vendors, incidence response operations, and all manner of critical infrastructure.”
CVE Was More Than a Database
At its core, CVE has always been a shared map of risk. The program established a consistent, vendor-neutral way to refer to vulnerabilities in operating systems, cloud platforms, applications, libraries, and embedded systems. It allowed cross-team coordination, integration with automated security tools, and the operationalization of threat intelligence.
When vulnerabilities were identified, the CVE system ensured that every stakeholder was speaking the same language — critical for patch triage, security alerting, and incident response. Without it, the cybersecurity community faces not just a lack of information but a breakdown in trust, coordination, and consistency.
The Timing Could Not Be Worse
The shutdown of CVE funding comes amid a broader collapse in federal cybersecurity support. MITRE has already initiated layoffs, reportedly affecting more than 400 employees after over $28 million in contract cancellations. Simultaneously, CISA is downsizing teams and allowing key contracts to lapse. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which maintains the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), is overwhelmed by a growing backlog of submissions and has acknowledged that its current tooling cannot scale with modern vulnerability volume.
This convergence of defunding and dysfunction is not just inconvenient — it creates systemic blind spots in how we identify, respond to, and contain cybersecurity threats.
The structural weakness was long-standing for years, and the CVE program operated under pressure. Community maintainers and security researchers raised concerns about inconsistencies in ID assignments, bottlenecks in processing, and limited transparency in the criteria for prioritizing vulnerabilities. Despite those issues, CVE remained the cornerstone of global vulnerability coordination because of its neutrality and accessibility.
However, the program's reliance on single-source funding, outdated tooling, and manual enrichment processes meant that it was never built to handle today’s scale of interconnected vulnerabilities, especially in a world of SBOMs, zero-day exploit markets, and increasingly AI-powered attack surfaces.
The Consequences of Losing CVE
The discontinuation of federal support for CVE will create cascading challenges across the ecosystem. Vendors will likely create proprietary systems for tracking vulnerabilities, introducing fragmentation and the loss of a shared security vocabulary. This will complicate vulnerability management and create dangerous inconsistencies across toolchains.
Security advisories and alerts may lose their effectiveness without consistent identifiers to anchor their relevance. Incident response teams will face delays or confusion when trying to correlate logs, CVSS scores, exploit indicators, or upstream project disclosures. Tool vendors will have to rework integrations and lose access to standardized feeds that power detection and remediation pipelines.
More importantly, critical infrastructure sectors — including healthcare, energy, transportation, and finance — that depend on CVE IDs for regulatory compliance and vulnerability assessments may now face increased exposure without clear replacements.
A Fork in the Road for Open Source Security
The open source community may be hit hardest. For smaller projects without enterprise backing, CVE provided a way to disclose vulnerabilities responsibly and coordinate fixes with users and distributors. That process is now at risk of being delayed or replaced by inconsistent, non-standard reporting systems.
The open source security ecosystem, already stretched thin, may lose visibility into vulnerabilities that fall outside of high-profile commercial tooling. In the worst case, vulnerability information will become a fragmented patchwork of inconsistent naming conventions, delayed notifications, and reduced trust in automated tooling.
Steps Forward:
Addressing the Gap In light of this development, the broader cybersecurity community must act quickly and with purpose to prevent a systemic breakdown in vulnerability coordination. The following are immediate and longer-term recommendations:
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Preserve access to existing CVE data. Organizations should mirror the existing CVE database and GitHub repositories before access is interrupted. Open-source communities can work collaboratively to create distributed mirrors that remain publicly accessible and verifiable.
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Transition to distributed vulnerability identifiers. Open Source Vulnerabilities (OSV.dev), the GitHub Advisory Database, and SPDX security advisories are emerging alternatives that can help fill the gap. These systems should be evaluated, expanded, and supported as potential successors to centralized CVE tracking.
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Invest in AI-powered vulnerability enrichment. The backlog at NIST’s NVD highlights the need for scalable enrichment and triaging of vulnerabilities. Open-source tooling that automates metadata classification, patch tracking, and exploit correlation using machine learning should be prioritized and funded.
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Formalize open governance around vulnerability disclosure. The CVE program lacked a clear public governance model that empowered open-source contributors. New systems must include governance structures that are transparent, accountable, and representative of global stakeholders — including open-source projects, civil society, and international contributors.
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Pressure policymakers to treat vulnerability management as critical infrastructure. Coordinated vulnerability disclosure is not a peripheral function. It is foundational to national and global cybersecurity. Advocacy is urgently needed to reframe CVE as a public safety utility that deserves permanent, nonpartisan support — not an expendable budget line.
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Support a community-led security trust layer. As vulnerabilities proliferate across software supply chains, we need a public, community-owned infrastructure for assigning, verifying, and distributing vulnerability information. This may include the federation of trusted assigners, integration with SBOMs, and standardized APIs for tooling.
Regulatory Fallout: CVE Loss Meets EU Cyber Resilience Act
The implications of CVE’s defunding are magnified by the regulatory shifts now underway with the European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). Finalized in early 2024 and entering into effect over the next two years, the CRA introduces mandatory vulnerability handling and disclosure requirements for digital products placed on the European market. This includes explicit obligations for software producers — including open-source maintainers in some cases — to track, report, and remediate vulnerabilities under strict timelines.
These obligations depend on the very infrastructure that CVE provided.
The CRA’s requirements hinge on accurate vulnerability identification, consistent metadata, and traceable timelines from disclosure to mitigation. Without a globally recognized vulnerability ID system like CVE, many companies and maintainers will struggle to meet these compliance demands. The fragmentation of vulnerability data sources could result in delays or discrepancies in CRA reporting, increasing the risk of penalties, liability, and reputational damage.
Moreover, the CRA encourages regulators and product security incident response teams (PSIRTs) to rely on existing standards and tooling — most of which have been built around CVE and its integrations. Without continuity in these systems, organizations may need to rebuild compliance workflows from scratch, including re-validating SBOM entries, rebuilding security advisories, and integrating with new, potentially untested vulnerability databases.
There is a real risk that in trying to enhance cybersecurity through regulatory pressure, the EU’s own enforcement infrastructure may be undermined by the sudden loss of one of its foundational data sources. Unless mitigation efforts are prioritized, companies operating in both U.S. and EU jurisdictions may find themselves caught between regulatory expectations and the collapse of the very system that enabled compliance.
Final Thoughts
The termination of CVE funding is more than a policy failure. It is an inflection point in how we understand digital risk. If we treat security intelligence as disposable, we should not be surprised when breaches become normalized. The CVE system allowed engineers to speak the same language about risk. It gave defenders the time and tools to act. Without it, we lose not just a dataset — we lose our map of the terrain. The road ahead must be paved by the community, for the community. We cannot rely on unstable government funding to maintain the most critical systems that protect our digital future.
This is a quick post to get awareness out; I’ll write a more in-depth analysis and protocol for vulnerability coverage as this develops. If this event teaches us anything, it is this: cybersecurity cannot be outsourced, and safety cannot be paused.
