DevSecOps in Practice

Common Platform Enumeration (CPE)

After understanding CVEs and CVSS, let's talk about another important and complementary concept: Common Platform Enumeration (CPE).

Imagine you're part of an IT security team at a large organization. Your company uses hundreds of different software applications and operating systems with different versions, and you need to know which ones might be affected by newly discovered vulnerabilities. By using CPE, your vulnerability management tool can automatically match the exact software versions in your inventory to known vulnerabilities listed in public databases. For instance, if a new CVE is issued for a specific version of a popular operating system, the tool uses its standardized CPE name to quickly identify which systems in your organization run that OS.

In other words, CPE is a standardized naming system designed to uniquely identify software, hardware, and operating systems. Think of it as a universal cataloging system that helps organizations clearly label and track the various IT products they use. This consistent naming makes it easier to cross-reference products with vulnerabilities (like those found in CVEs) and assess their risk using scoring systems such as CVSS. The full list of CPEs is maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as part of its U.S. National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and is publicly available in the form of an authoritative dictionary. The current version of this standard is CPE 2.3.

The CPE (Common Platform Enumeration) name follows a structured format used to uniquely identify software, hardware, and firmware.

prefix:version:part:vendor:product:version:update:edition:language:sw_edition:target_sw:target_hw:other

Each field represents a specific attribute of the product: