Severity Levels for Security Issues

Sources of Vulnerability

• Security scanner tickets such as those filed by Nexpose and Snyk
• Bug bounty findings found by security researchers through Bugcrowd
• Security vulnerabilities reported by the security team as part of reviews
• Security vulnerabilities reported by Atlassians

Severity Framework and Rating

Atlassian uses Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) as a method of assessing security risk and prioritization for each discovered vulnerability. CVSS is an industry standard vulnerability metric. You can learn more about CVSS at FIRST.org.

Severity Levels

Atlassian security advisories include a severity level. This severity level is based on our self-calculated CVSS score for each specific vulnerability.

• Critical
• High
• Medium
• Low

For CVSS v3 Atlassian uses the following severity rating system:

Severity Level: Critical

Vulnerabilities that score in the critical range usually have most of the following characteristics:

• Exploitation of the vulnerability likely results in root-level compromise of servers or infrastructure devices.
• Exploitation is usually straightforward, in the sense that the attacker does not need any special authentication credentials or knowledge about individual victims, and does not need to persuade a target user, for example via social engineering, into performing any special functions.

For critical vulnerabilities, is advised that you patch or upgrade as soon as possible, unless you have other mitigating measures in place. For example, a mitigating factor could be if your installation is not accessible from the Internet.

Severity Level: High

Vulnerabilities that score in the high range usually have some of the following characteristics:

• The vulnerability is difficult to exploit.
• Exploitation could result in elevated privileges.
• Exploitation could result in a significant data loss or downtime. 

Severity Level: Medium

Vulnerabilities that score in the medium range usually have some of the following characteristics:

• Vulnerabilities that require the attacker to manipulate individual victims via social engineering tactics.
• Denial of service vulnerabilities that are difficult to set up.
• Exploits that require an attacker to reside on the same local network as the victim.
• Vulnerabilities where exploitation provides only very limited access.
• Vulnerabilities that require user privileges for successful exploitation.

Severity Level: Low

Vulnerabilities in the low range typically have very little impact on an organization's business. Exploitation of such vulnerabilities usually requires local or physical system access. Vulnerabilities in third party code that are unreachable from Atlassian code may be downgraded to low severity.

Remediation Timeline

Atlassian sets service level objectives for fixing security vulnerabilities based on the security severity level and the affected product. We have defined timeframes for fixing security issues according to our security bug fix policy.

Accelerated Resolution Timeframes apply to:

• All cloud-based Atlassian products
• Jira Align (both the cloud and self-managed versions)
• Any other software or system managed by Atlassian, or running on Atlassian infrastructure

Extended Resolution Timeframes apply to:

• All self-managed Atlassian products
  • These are products that are installed by customers on customer-managed systems
  • This includes Atlassian's Data Center, desktop, and mobile applications

CVSS Resolution Timeframe