The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published a paper Wednesday that lays out its plan for improving the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program, a contract for which nearly ended last year before a last-minute reprieve.

The white paper outlines the components of a “Quality Era” for the program, widely used as the definitive clearinghouse for data on vulnerabilities in software and other products, even as the number of CVEs surges. 

“CISA remains committed to leading, growing and sustaining the CVE Program into the foreseeable future, just as we’ve done for more than 25 years without fail,” said Chris Butera, acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity. “Informed by CVE community feedback, this whitepaper communicates CISA’s effort to support and enable stronger participation and governance, a program-wide maturation effort.”

The CVE program has been in a “Growth Era,” according to CISA. Over 67,000 new CVEs have been published in 2026 as of last week, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology National Vulnerability Database program has seen a 263% increase in CVE submissions between 2020 and 2025. Artificial intelligence has furthered the rise.

“These pressures intensify quality challenges across the CVE ecosystem,” the white paper states. “While faster discovery and reporting can improve the value of vulnerability information when records are complete, consistent, timely, and actionable, the same acceleration can expose gaps in processes, tooling, coordination, and accountability — especially when the quality of the submissions is uneven.” 

The plan calls for advancing data quality across four key dimensions: transparent and effective program governance, broad and active participation across the global software community, data infrastructure that supports CVE operational functions and reliable CVE record content.

Some vulnerability experts have questioned whether other organizations should take over CISA’s stewardship, given budget cuts at the agency.

Butera invited further feedback from the CVE community on the white paper, which stems from an earlier strategy document on the future of the program.

Some CVE experts that CyberScoop spoke to were supportive of what CISA wants to achieve, but skeptical about elements of the white paper.

“We’ve been working around long-standing quality issues in CVE reports for decades. Incomplete or inconsistent records create real downstream work for the security tools, developers, and organizations trying to determine whether they’re actually affected and what to do next,” said Sonatype’s co-founder and chief technology officer Brian Fox. “So it’s good to see CISA acknowledge that quality has to extend beyond the record itself to governance, infrastructure, and participation across the ecosystem.”

But, he added, “I’ll believe we’ve entered a ‘Quality Era’ when we can see the improvement in the actual data and in the decisions that data enables.”

Tom Alrich, who leads the OWASP PURL Expansion Working Group that’s focused on establishing a protocol for creating Product URLs for commercial software, said CISA’s white paper ignores a particularly important and growing issue.

“I support everything mentioned. I also support the flag, motherhood and apple pie,” he said. “However, nothing in there is going to affect the CVE program’s most important problem: that a huge and growing percentage of new CVE records don’t contain a machine-readable software identifier.”

Caitlin Condon, VulnCheck’s vice president of security research, said that “CISA and the CVE program are well-positioned to both observe challenges in this space and to create (and enforce) standards that explicitly state what ‘quality’ means in CVE records.”

But she said the white paper was more the basis for a future framework than a full-fledged framework in itself.

“Many of the potential success metrics suggested in the document can be measured today, but simply aren’t shared publicly,” Condon said. “In future iterations on the framework, I’d hope to see more transparency on CVE metrics as they stand today, along with reasoning on why those metrics are the right ones (versus simply the things that are easiest to measure qualitatively or quantitatively).”

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For the first time, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is advising critical infrastructure owners and operators on how to set up phony systems, accounts and data to deceive would-be hackers into being distracted and discovered.

The Wednesday guidance, “Using Cyber Decoys to Strengthen Detection and Response,” arose from internal discussions with CISA’s threat hunters and penetration testers about how decoys can be a cheap, effective way to disrupt attackers, said Chris Butera, acting executive director of the cybersecurity division.

‘We’ve been looking at it for a while, and we believe that decoys can be both a very low-cost but actually high-fidelity way to detect an adversary who’s already gained access to networks,” Butera told CyberScoop at Google Cloud’s Cyber Defense Summit 26.

It’s especially complementary for zero-trust (maintaining that no user or device is trustworthy by default) and assume-compromise (assuming that hackers have already gotten into a network) approaches, Butera said.

While the guidance is “really relevant for everyone,” it’s something that can be especially useful in critical infrastructure sectors that don’t have the most personnel or money, he said.

“This could be something to prioritize as a lower cost solution,” Butera said. “You can create your own honey tokens yourself.”

The 22-page guidance includes decoy principles and goals, definitions of the different kinds of decoys and how to use them and scenarios for deployment.

Honeytokens, for instance, are “Data elements or logical objects with no legitimate business use (e.g., fake records, credentials, or files) planted to detect unauthorized access or exfiltration. Any interaction strongly suggests malicious or otherwise unauthorized activity.”

“Cyber decoys used in a proactive cyber defense strategy help make critical infrastructure networks unfriendly places for adversaries and enhance resilience to compromise, even against living-off-the-land techniques,” Butera said in a news release. “With this guide, CISA is raising awareness of cyber decoy techniques and enabling any defensive team regardless of skill level to understand the value and steps to implementing decoy operations. CISA encourages critical infrastructure organizations to review this guide and implement a cyber decoy strategy.” 

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