CVE
Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures: a unique identifier (like CVE-2024-1234) assigned to a publicly disclosed security vulnerability.
CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) is the global naming system for security vulnerabilities, maintained by MITRE under sponsorship from CISA. Each CVE ID uniquely identifies a single flaw across vendors, scanners, and advisories: `CVE-2024-3094` (the xz-utils backdoor) means the same thing in a Red Hat advisory, an NVD entry, and a vulnerability scanner report. CVE IDs do not score severity; the companion CVSS framework does that. Patch management programs revolve around tracking newly published CVEs against installed software.