Prioritization

Severity isn't priority. A scan can return a wall of "high" findings, but which one you fix first depends on where it lives. Declare two attributes on a component and Draugr ranks every finding into a band P1–P4:

• exposure (public → authenticated → internal → restricted), how reachable the component is. This drives likelihood.
• criticality (critical → important → supporting), the business impact if it fails. This drives impact.

A finding's normalized severity (from its CVSS score, or its SARIF level, or a control floor) combines with the component's exposure × criticality through two small lookup matrices to yield the priority. So the same CVE is P1 on a public, business-critical gateway and P3 on an internal dev tool, same finding, different risk.

Both matrices are printed in full below, with four findings worked through them.

Exploitability enrichment (optional). Severity can be raised by real-world signals before ranking. See Exploitability: KEV and EPSS below.

• Focus: --min-priority P2 lists only the findings worth acting on now (P1 = act now · P2 = this cycle · P3 = backlog · P4 = track).
• Gate: --fail-on-priority P1 fails the build on any P1, component-aware gating with no per-component config.
• A component left unclassified is treated as high-risk, so nothing slips silently.

Set exposure and criticality by hand (see the Saga schema) or with the guided draugr classify wizard.

The two matrices#

Nothing here is inferred at runtime. These are the shipped defaults (pkg/prioritization/prioritization.go), and a descriptor can override individual cells.

Two different meanings of "critical"#

critical is a value on both axes and means something different on each. It is the one thing worth pinning before reading the tables.

	describes	values
criticality	the component, how much the organization depends on it	critical · important · supporting
severity	the flaw. How much harm it could cause if exploited	critical · high · medium · low

criticality: critical says the organization depends on this component. severity: critical says this flaw could cause serious harm if it were exploited. Neither implies the other: a component the organization depends on carries low-severity findings like anything else, and a supporting one can carry a critical flaw.

The two meet in step 2, a critical component with a critical finding is P1, and the same critical component with a low finding is P3. Each table below names its row axis and its column axis for that reason.

Step 1, the component's context tier#

What the descriptor declares about the component, crossed into one of four tiers. This step does not look at the finding at all.

Rows are exposure. Columns are criticality.

exposure	critical	important	supporting
public	C1	C1	C2
authenticated	C1	C2	C3
internal	C2	C3	C4
restricted	C3	C4	C4

Step 2, the band#

The tier crossed with the finding's normalized severity.

Rows are the tier from step 1. Columns are severity, the flaw's own badness, not the component's importance.

tier	critical	high	medium	low
C1	P1	P1	P2	P3
C2	P1	P2	P2	P3
C3	P2	P3	P3	P4
C4	P2	P3	P4	P4

Both are monotonic: raising exposure, criticality or severity never lowers a band. Of the 48 combinations, 9 land in P1 and 9 in P4. P1 is deliberately scarce, a band that a third of findings reach is not a queue anybody works from.

Where the severity in step 2 comes from#

A scanner reporting a CVSS score is banded on the standard v3 ranges:

score	severity
9.0 – 10.0	critical
7.0 – 8.9	high
4.0 – 6.9	medium
below 4.0	low

A finding with no score, a secret, a static-analysis rule, an IaC check, is banded from the SARIF level instead: error is high, warning is medium, note and none are low.

Four findings, worked through#

A P1. CVE-2021-44228 scores 10.0, so its severity is critical. The component declares exposure: public and criticality: critical. It is one the organization depends on, so its tier is C1. C1 crossed with a critical severity = P1. Both criticals are in play here, and they are answering different questions.

Another P1, from a lower score. A CVE scoring 7.5 is high, not critical. On the same public, business-critical component the tier is still C1, and C1 × high = P1. A high on something public and depended on outranks a critical on something nobody can reach.

The same 10.0, two bands lower. Put CVE-2021-44228 on a component declaring exposure: internal and criticality: important. The tier is C3, and C3 × critical = P2. Nothing about the flaw changed; the answer to "how much does this matter here" did.

A P4. A CVE scoring 3.7 is low. On exposure: restricted and criticality: supporting the tier is C4, and C4 × low = P4. Still reported, still counted, and not something to interrupt anybody for.

An unclassified component#

A component that declares neither field is read as public and critical, tier C1, the most concerning. An unclassified component surfaces rather than hides, and both rows read not declared in the report so the band is traceable to the gap that produced it.

The fix is a descriptor edit rather than an argument with the tool.

Exploitability: KEV and EPSS#

CVSS says how bad a vulnerability could be in the abstract. It says nothing about whether anyone is actually exploiting it. Two public datasets close that gap, and Draugr folds either into a finding's severity before it is ranked, so "what to fix first" reflects the real world, not just the theory. New to these? EPSS & KEV explained covers the concepts; this page covers using them.

Signal	What it is	Effect on a matching finding
KEV	CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, CVEs with confirmed, observed exploitation	severity becomes critical, whatever it was
EPSS	FIRST's Exploit Prediction Scoring System, a daily 0–1 probability that a CVE will be exploited in the next 30 days	severity is raised one band (low→medium→high→critical) when the score is at or above --epss-threshold

KEV wins where both apply: observed exploitation outranks a prediction about it. The prediction is still recorded, a finding raised by KEV carries what EPSS said about the same CVE, as alsoMatched on its escalation, so a count of how often EPSS reaches your findings is a count of what it reached rather than of what it happened to decide.

Using them#

Turn it on in the descriptor, where it gets reviewed:

config:
  exploitability:
    kev: cache          # path | cache | auto
    epss: cache
    epssThreshold: 0.5  # optional; the default
    maxAge: 24h         # optional; how old a cached feed may be

draugr feeds update                    # into ~/.draugr/feeds
draugr scan draugr.saga.yaml           # enrichment is on, no flags to remember

In the Saga rather than only in flags because it is a decision about how findings are ranked. A team that agrees to use KEV needs somewhere to write that down that a reviewer sees and every pipeline reads, not a flag whoever wrote the workflow has to remember.

--kev and --epss still work and override the descriptor, which is what you want for a one-off:

draugr scan draugr.saga.yaml --kev cache --epss cache      # without a descriptor entry
draugr scan draugr.saga.yaml --epss-threshold 0.1          # widen the net for this run only

Only a flag you actually type overrides, passing --epss-threshold 0.5 beats a descriptor that says 0.1, and not passing it leaves the descriptor's value alone. See config.exploitability for the full block.

A scan never fetches on its own. cache reads what feeds update left and cannot reach the network, so there is no network dependency inside your pipeline, nothing leaves your environment about what you are scanning, and the same inputs produce the same verdict. That is the same guarantee the bring-your-own-file route has always given; it just no longer requires you to know two URLs.

draugr feeds status says what is cached, how old it is, and the digest of each copy:

FEED   FETCHED                AGE            SIZE       DIGEST
kev    2026-08-01 09:12Z      6 hours        1.5 MiB    sha256:15b44d7c9c57
epss   2026-07-29 08:55Z      3 days (stale) 10.3 MiB   sha256:41c20e9dc3cf

In CI, make the fetch its own step. A feed outage then fails where it happened, loudly, instead of producing a scan that ranked everything as though nothing were exploited:

- run: draugr feeds update
- run: draugr scan draugr.saga.yaml --kev cache --epss cache

Working locally, auto saves you remembering: it reads the cache when it is fresh and fetches when it is missing or more than a day old.

draugr scan draugr.saga.yaml --kev auto --epss auto
draugr scan draugr.saga.yaml --epss auto --epss-threshold 0.1   # widen the net

If a fetch fails and there is a cached copy, the scan uses it and says so rather than failing. A feed outage should not break a gate that has a usable answer on disk. With nothing cached, it is an error: you asked for enrichment and did not get it, and a run that quietly skips escalation is worse than one that stops.

What the report says about it#

A run that used exploitability data says so, says which copy, and says what it changed:

Exploitability: KEV 2026-08-01 · EPSS 2026-08-02 · 3 findings raised

"nothing raised" is printed when nothing moved, because that is a result rather than an absence. Without it, the only way to learn that a feed changed nothing is to read every finding looking for a note that is not there, and then wonder whether you missed one.

The count is over the whole run, not the visible listing, --top and --min-priority narrow what is shown, and this answers what the feeds did, not what fitted on the page.

Each finding that was actually moved carries the reason underneath it:

  P1  high  8.1  CVE-2024-3094   sca  trivy  go.mod:12
      xz: malicious code in the upstream tarballs
      ↑ ranked as critical · on KEV (2026-08-01)

The Severity column keeps showing what the scanner said. Enrichment feeds the ranking rather than rewriting the scanner's rating, so a finding can be high and still be P1, and the note is what explains it. Overwriting the scanner's number would leave nothing to compare against and no way to see that a signal was applied at all.

This is the difference between evidence and a hint. A P1 on its own is a conclusion with the premise withheld; ranked as critical because CISA listed it on a date you can check is something a reader can verify, disagree with, or reproduce six months later.

Findings nothing moved carry no note, so the note means something when it appears. The same information is in the markdown and HTML reports, and in --format json and --format sarif under escalation on each finding, with the feeds themselves under exploitability.

A stale feed is marked in the report rather than only warned about while the scan ran. The logs of the run that produced a report are exactly where nobody looks six weeks later.

Staleness#

EPSS is republished daily. A stale copy does not fail. It ranks a finding lower than today's data would, which is the failure mode that looks like success. So a scan reading a feed more than a day old warns and names the age:

WARN using a stale exploitability feed feed=epss fetched_at=2026-07-29T08:55:00Z age="3 days"

draugr feeds update refreshes it; a daily job is plenty. Raise config.exploitability.maxAge on a runner deliberately pinned to a known copy of the data, reproducing last quarter's verdict requires last quarter's feed, and being told it is old every time helps nobody.

Bring your own file#

--kev and --epss still take a path, which is the air-gapped route and needs no cache at all:

curl -fsSL -o kev.json \
  https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/feeds/known_exploited_vulnerabilities.json
curl -fsSL https://epss.empiricalsecurity.com/epss_scores-current.csv.gz | gunzip > epss.csv

draugr scan draugr.saga.yaml --kev kev.json --epss epss.csv

--kev takes CISA's JSON as published; --epss takes FIRST's CSV (cve,epss,percentile. Comment and header lines are skipped). Either signal works on its own, and each accepts a path, cache, or auto, in the descriptor or on the command line.

Setting DRAUGR_OFFLINE=1 stops auto fetching anything: it reads the cache, or says clearly that there is nothing to read.

Choosing an EPSS threshold#

--epss-threshold defaults to 0.5: a coin-flip chance of exploitation within 30 days. That is a deliberately high bar. EPSS scores are heavily skewed. Most CVEs sit far below 0.01, so lowering the threshold widens the net faster than the number suggests.

Threshold	Roughly means	Use when
0.5 (default)	very likely to be exploited	you want few, high-confidence escalations
0.1	notably elevated risk	a balanced setting for most teams
0.01	above the long tail	you would rather over- than under-react

Pick one deliberately and keep it stable: a threshold that moves between runs makes two scans incomparable.

What it touches, and what it doesn't#

• Only CVE-identified findings. Enrichment looks for a CVE id in the finding's rule id, so it reaches sca and images results. SAST, secrets and IaC findings carry no CVE and are never escalated. Their severities come from the scanner and any control floor.
• Severity, not priority, directly. Enrichment raises severity; priority is then recomputed from severity × exposure × criticality. An escalated CVE on a restricted, supporting component may still not be P1, which is the point: exploitability matters in context.
• The gate follows automatically. Because both bands and levels derive from severity, --fail-on-priority and --fail-on see the enriched values with no extra configuration.

A worked example#

A dependency carries a CVE scored CVSS 6.1 → medium, on a component classified public / important.

Run	Severity	Priority
no enrichment	medium	P3
--epss epss.csv, score 0.62 ≥ 0.5	high (one band up)	P2
--kev kev.json, and it's listed	critical	P1

Same finding, same component, three different answers about when to fix it, and the last is the one that matters, because somebody is exploiting it today.

Related: EPSS & KEV explained · Vulnerability prioritization · CVE, CVSS and severity · scan flags

The component is part of the finding#

A finding records which component it came from, and that is what makes its band checkable. The band is computed from that component's declared exposure and criticality, so a report showing P1 without naming the component would state a conclusion and withhold its premise.

It also means the same flaw in two components is two findings. A library shared by a public, business-critical service and an internal tool is one vulnerability and two different risks, and reporting it once would keep whichever was merged first, which can be the one that does not matter.

Some findings are not bounded by the component#

Exposure and criticality answer "how much does a flaw here matter", and for a dependency CVE that is exactly the right question: a vulnerable library reachable from the internet is a different problem from the same library in a batch job.

It is the wrong question for a leaked credential. A credential is valid wherever it is valid, a cloud account, a registry, an artifact store, and git history is frequently readable by more people than the service is reachable by, so internal can understate who is able to obtain it.

So a control may declare that its findings are ranked at a fixed context tier, regardless of what the component says. The secrets control declares C1, the tier a public, business-critical component gets, so a credential on the least exposed, least critical component in your descriptor ranks exactly as it would on your front door.

With the control's severity floor at high, that means P1. Two reasons it is not something short of P1:

• --fail-on-priority P1 is the gate this documentation recommends. Anything lower means a credential fails the severity gate and passes the priority one, which is the same contradiction one band over.
• The claim is that exposure does not bound the finding. A band that still moves with exposure, only less, is a third position, exposure partly bounds it, that nothing argues for.

A tier rather than a fixed band, because the claim is about exposure and not about urgency. Severity is still the scanner's answer and the severity floor's: a critical finding and a high one should not collapse into one row because they share a control.

The report says when the floor applied, because a band you cannot reconstruct from the component's classification is one you have to take on trust. It states the conclusion rather than the mechanism: the floor works by ranking the finding at the most exposed tier, but printing that against a component you have classified as internal reads as a claim about the component, and you can see it is not true.

  P1   high   -   github-pat   secrets   gitleaks   cfg.txt:1
       ↑ a leaked credential is high priority wherever it is found

A false positive is not what this is for. A finding you have judged belongs in config.exclude, where it stays in the report marked suppressed with your reason. Ranking it lower would hide it from the gate and record nothing, the wrong lever, and the same category error this exists to fix.

Nothing else changes. A control that declares no floor is ranked entirely by the matrices above, which is correct for every control that does not override its scanner's severity in the first place.