Risk Score

Release status

Risk Score is in Early Access and available for Snyk Open Source and Snyk Container, with Snyk Enterprise and Snyk Free plans. If you want to set it up in your Group, contact your Snyk account team.

Use Snyk Preview to replace the Priority Score with the new Risk Score for Snyk Open Source and Snyk Container issues.

The Snyk Risk Score is a single value assigned to an issue, applied by automatic risk analysis for all vulnerability-type issues. License issues are not supported. Risk Score is based on the potential impact and likelihood of exploitability. Ranging from 0 to 1,000, the score represents the risk imposed on your environment and enables a risk-based prioritization approach.

Risk score remains the same over time if the contributing factors do not change. However, some contributing factors, such as Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS), potentially can change frequently. The number of days since the vulnerability was first published is also a factor and causes the score to change once, when the number of days becomes more than one year and the likelihood subscore decreases.

Since real risk is scarce, you should expect a significant drift in the distribution of scores, as can be seen in this example of Project score distributions:

Example Project scores distribution

Risk Score replaces the Priority Score directly. See the priority score docs for how to interact with the Risk Score in the UI, API, and Reports, where the Risk Score is now introduced when enabled.

Risk Score is not available in the CLI.

The Risk Score replaces the Priority Score only after the Snyk Open Source and Snyk Container Projects are re-tested.

You can wait for the Projects to be automatically re-tested (daily for Snyk Open Source and weekly for Snyk Container), or you can manually re-test the Project.

In the API, the relevant fields are still named with priority.When Risk Score is enabled, the scores and factors populated in these fields are based on the Risk Score model as part of the early access stage.

Explore the Risk Score by issue

When looking at Issue card information, hover over the score to see the type of score (Priority or Risk Score) that is being displayed. The Risk Score tooltip provides information about the subscore and the Risk Factors contributing to the score.

Risk Score tooltip showing Impact and Likelihood

About the Risk Score model

The Snyk Risk Score Model

The model that powers the Risk Score applies automatic risk analysis for each security issue based on the potential impact and likelihood of exploitability.

The Risk model results from extensive research conducted by the Snyk Security Data Science team and experienced security researchers. The model draws on expertise gained over the years in developing the Snyk Vulnerability Database.

Impact subscore

Objective impact factors are the CVSS impact metrics, Availability, Confidentiality, Integrity, and Scope, calculated based on the CVSS impact subscore. For Container issues, Provider Urgency is also taken into account.

The business criticality Project attribute will be taken into account as a contextual impact factor, increasing or decreasing the impact subscore. For more information, see Project attributes.

Likelihood subscore

Objective likelihood factors are taken into account:

• Exploit Maturity

• Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS)

• Age of advisory

• CVSS exploitability metrics: Attack vector, Privileges required, User interaction, and Scope

• Social Trends

• Malicious Package

• Provider Urgency (Snyk Container)

• Package popularity (Snyk Open Source)

The Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) is updated arbitrarily.

Contextual likelihood factors then increase or decrease the likelihood subscore:

• Reachability (Snyk Open Source Java, JavaScript)

• Transitive depth

Fixability is no longer considered part of the Score Calculation, as the effort needed to mitigate a security issue does not affect the risk it imposes. To focus on actionable issues, use Fixability filters and then use the Risk Score to start with the riskiest issues.

Risk factors drill down

Objective impact risk factors

Confidentiality

Represents the impact on customer’s data confidentiality, based on CVSS definition. Possible input values: None, Low, High

Integrity

Represents the impact on customer’s data integrity, based on CVSS definition. Possible input values: None, Low, High

Availability

Represents the impact of customer’s application availability based on CVSS definition. Possible input values: None, Low, High

Scope

Indicates whether the vulnerability can affect components outside of the target’s security scope, based on CVSS definition. The objective impact subscore is calculated based on the CVSS impact subscore. For more information, see the references on CVSS definitions above and the subscore equations.

Possible input value	Score impact
Unchanged	Impact subscore is not affected.
Changed	Impact subscore is affected.

Provider urgency (Snyk Container)

Urgency rating as provided by the relevant operating system distribution security team. For more information, see External information sources for relative importance in severity levels of detected Linux vulnerabilities.

Possible input value	Score impact
Critical	Impact subscore increases significantly.
High	Impact subscore increases.
Medium	Impact subscore decreases significantly.
Low	Impact subscore decreases significantly.

Provider Urgency affects the Likelihood subscore.

Contextual impact risk factor

Business criticality

User-defined Project attribute representing the subjective business impact of the respective application. For more information, see Project attributes.

Possible input value	Score impact
Critical	Impact subscore increases.
High	Impact subscore is not affected.
Medium	Impact subscore decreases.
Low	Impact subscore decreases significantly.

When you apply a business criticality attribute to a Project, a retest is required for the Risk Scores to incorporate the new data. When no Business Criticality is assigned, the Impact subscore will not be affected.

When the business criticality for a Project is not configured, the high default value is used so that the subscore remains unaffected.

Objective likelihood risk factors

Exploit maturity

Represents the existence and maturity of any public exploit retrieved and validated by Snyk. For more information, see View exploits, How exploits are determined.

Possible input value	Score impact
No Known Exploit	Impact subscore decreases significantly.
Proof of Concept	Impact subscore decreases slightly.
Functional	Impact subscore increases.
High	Impact subscore increases significantly.

EPSS score

Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) predicts whether a CVE will be exploited in the wild based on an elaborate model created and owned by the FIRST Organization. The probability is the direct output of the EPSS model and conveys an overall sense of the threat of exploitation in the wild. This data is updated daily, relying on the latest available EPSS model version. See the EPSS documentation for more details. Possible input values: EPSS score [0.00-1.00]

The likelihood subscore increases significantly according to the EPSS score.

If the vulnerability is found to be malicious, the EPSS value is set to 1. If no information regarding the EPSS is available, then the default value is 0.01055.

Attack vector

Represents the context by which vulnerability exploitation is possible, based on the CVSS definition.

Possible input values	Score impact
Network	Likelihood subscore increases.
Adjacent	Likelihood subscore decreases according to the level of remote access needed to exploit the vulnerability.
Local	Likelihood subscore decreases according to the level of remote access needed to exploit the vulnerability.
Physical	Likelihood subscore decreases according to the level of remote access needed to exploit the vulnerability.

Attack complexity

Represents the level of complexity defined by the conditions that must exist to exploit the vulnerability, based on the CVSS definition.

Possible input values	Score impact
High	Likelihood subscore decreases.
Low	Likelihood subscore increases.

Privileges required

Represents the level of privileges an attacker must possess before successfully exploiting the vulnerability, based on the CVSS definition.

Possible input values	Score impact
High	Likelihood subscore decreases according to the level of privileges required.
Low	Likelihood subscore decreases according to the level of privileges required.
None	Likelihood subscore increases.

User interaction

Represents the need for action from a user as part of the exploitation process, based on the CVSS definition.

Possible input values	Score impact
Required	Likelihood subscore decreases.
None	Likelihood subscore increases.

Social trends

Represents the social media traffic regarding this vulnerability. Snyk research has shown that greater social media interaction can predict future exploitation or point to existing exploitation. For more information, see Vulnerabilities with social trends.

Possible input values	Score impact
Trending	Likelihood subscore increases.
Not trending	Likelihood subscore does not change.

Malicious package

Malicious code deployed as a supply chain dependency is considered highly exploitable.

Possible input values	Score impact
True	Likelihood subscore increases significantly for Malicious Packages.
False	Likelihood subscore remains unchanged.

Age of vulnerability

A new vulnerability (up to one year) is more likely to be exploited than an old vulnerability (more than one year since publication)

Possible input values	Score impact
Days since the vulnerability was first published.	Less than one year old - Likelihood subscore increases. Over one year old - Likelihood subscore decreases.

Package popularity (Snyk Open Source)

If a package is relatively more popular for its ecosystem, it is more likely to be exploited as hackers benefit from a wider pool of potential targets.

Possible input values	Score impact
High	Likelihood subscore increases.
Medium	Likelihood subscore does not change.
Low	Likelihood subscore decreases.

Provider urgency (Snyk Container)

Importance rating as provided by the relevant operating system distribution security team. For more information, see External information sources for relative importance in severity levels of detected Linux vulnerabilities.

Possible input values	Score impact
Critical	Impact subscore increases significantly.
High	Impact subscore increases.
Medium	Impact subscore decreases.
Low	Impact subscore decreases significantly.

When neither CVSS nor Importance rating is provided, Provider Urgency is set toLowby default. Provider Urgency also affects the Impact subscore.

Contextual likelihood risk factors

Transitive depth

Building on past studies, Snyk research has shown that if a vulnerability is introduced to a Project transitively rather than directly, it is less likely that an exploitable function path will exist.

Possible input values	Score impact
Direct dependency	Likelihood subscore does not change.
Indirect dependency	Likelihood subscore decreases.

Reachability

Snyk static code analysis determines whether the vulnerable method is being called. This is supported for Java and JavaScript. For more details, navigate to the Reachability analysis page. When Reachability is not enabled, the Likelihood subscore will not change, and the factor will not show up.

Possible input values	Score impact
Reachable	Likelihood subscore increases, and transitive depth is not considered.
No path found	Likelihood subscore does not change.