  Having a precise vulnerability discovery model (VDM) would provide a useful
quantitative insight to assess software security. Thus far, several models have
been proposed with some evidence supporting their goodness-of-fit.
  In this work we describe an independent validation of the applicability of
six existing VDMs in seventeen releases of the three popular browsers Firefox,
Google Chrome and Internet Explorer. We have collected five different kinds of
data sets based on different definitions of a vulnerability. We introduce two
quantitative metrics, goodness-of-fit entropy and goodness-of-fit quality, to
analyze the impact of vulnerability data sets to the stability as well as
quality of VDMs in the software life cycles.
  The experiment result shows that the "confirmed-by-vendors' advisories" data
sets apparently yields more stable and better results for VDMs. And the
performance of the s-shape logistic model (AML) seems to be superior
performance in overall. Meanwhile, Anderson thermodynamic model (AT) is indeed
not suitable for modeling the vulnerability discovery process. This means that
the discovery process of vulnerabilities and normal bugs are different because
the interests of people in finding security vulnerabilities are more than
finding normal programming bugs.

Cryptography and Security