PECR: A Reproducible Specification and Synthetic Stress Test of Telemetry-Informed Vulnerability Prioritization for SD-WAN

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 4 Aug 2026] PECR: A Reproducible Specification and Synthetic Stress Test of Telemetry-Informed Vulnerability Prioritization for SD-WAN Saeed Alam Software-defined wide-area networking concentrates operational authority in controllers, orchestrators, and Internet-facing edges, but severity-only remediation queues do not represent current exposure or evidence quality. This paper specifies Predictive Exposure and Cryptographic Readiness (PECR), a decision-support method that combines nine normalized severity, threat, reachability, and consequence factors while reporting confidence and score intervals separately. Cryptographic dependencies enter an independent migration queue. The evaluation uses 100 role- and zone-conditioned synthetic vulnerability-asset records over 62 role-consistent assets, plus 30 independent generator replications. Against the operational PECR order, CVSS-only, EPSS-only, KEV-first, and CVSS x EPSS queues yield Kendall τ values of 0.196, 0.221, 0.301, and 0.234; a stronger five-factor context-lite comparator yields 0.755. Across 30,000 joint Dirichlet weight draws, median τ is 0.836, 0.893, and 0.924 under broad, moderate, and narrow perturbations. Masking 10% of factor cells labels 47 records as evidence-limited because their intervals cross a decision boundary. The study establishes executable specification, synthetic queue differentiation, and stress-test robustness. It does not establish predictive accuracy, avoided loss, or production effectiveness because no real outcome labels are used. Comments: 17 pages, 8 tables, 2 figures. ACM article format Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) ACM classes: C.2.0; K.6.5 Cite as: arXiv:2608.03110 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2608.03110v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.03110 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Saeed Alam [view email] [v1] Tue, 4 Aug 2026 04:30:18 UTC (408 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs cs.NI 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?)