The Human Vulnerabilities & Exploits (HVE) Framework

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 8 Jun 2026] The Human Vulnerabilities & Exploits (HVE) Framework Avichai Ben, Tom Rahav, Daniel Illaev, Aviv Nahon, Avi Grushka The cybersecurity community has invested over two decades in building standardized frameworks, the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) system, the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), and the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) to identify, classify, and remediate threats to digital infrastructure. However, an emerging body of research reveals that a vast majority of successful cyberattacks exploit not software flaws, but human behavioral and psychological vulnerabilities. Social engineering, fraud, and scam attacks, which manipulate human cognition, emotion, and trust, do not have an equivalent standardized framework. Meanwhile, behavioral science and psychology research has established robust theoretical foundations, such as dual-process theory, prospect theory, social influence frameworks, and visceral state models, which explain precisely why and how these attacks succeed. This paper introduces the Human Vulnerabilities & Exploits (HVE) Framework, a structured approach for identifying, classifying, and mitigating the behavioral and psychological vulnerabilities exploited in scams, social engineering, and other human-centric fraud and attacks, analogous in concept to how CVE helps classify software vulnerabilities: it provides a shared, machine-readable taxonomy with structured identifiers, multi-dimensional severity scoring via the Human Vulnerability Severity Score (HVSS), and actionable remediation guidance through Human Vulnerability Patches (HVPs). This introduction synthesizes the relevant literature across cybersecurity standardization, behavioral science, and fraud defense to establish the theoretical and practical foundations for the HVE framework, whose architecture and technical specifications are detailed in subsequent sections. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computers and Society (cs.CY) Cite as: arXiv:2606.10083 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.10083v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.10083 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Avi Grushka [view email] [v1] Mon, 8 Jun 2026 19:06:18 UTC (3,237 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.CY References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)