Ask most security teams how good their defenses are and you'll get a qualitative answer — 'pretty solid,' 'better than last year,' 'we have some gaps.' What's usually missing is a number. Which threats can we actually detect? Where are the holes in our coverage? How does our detection capability today compare to last quarter? Without quantification, security investment is guided by intuition, and intuition is a poor allocator of a limited budget.
The grant US12107869B1, "Automated quantified assessment, recommendations and mitigation actions for enterprise level security operations" (issued October 1, 2024, assigned to Anvilogic, Inc.), is about putting numbers on the problem. Its CPC classifications span the intrusion-detection classes H04L 63/1416 and H04L 63/1425, the access class H04L 63/105 and H04L 63/145, and the policy class H04L 63/20 — assessment of the security operation itself, not just the threats it faces.
“A dynamic threat landscape to which computer resources of a specific enterprise are subject is tracked. Data feeds maintained by a security system of the enterprise are assessed. The effectiveness of data feed utilization by the security system is quantified, relative to the threat landscape.”— U.S. Patent No. 12,107,869 source
The mechanism worth understanding is the shift in subject. Most security tools assess threats; this one assesses the defense. By automatically measuring detection coverage against the landscape of known attacker techniques and quantifying where the gaps are, it lets an organization see its security posture as a metric that can be tracked, compared, and improved deliberately — and then it recommends specific mitigations to close the measured gaps.
For defenders, the practical takeaway is that you can't manage what you can't measure. Quantified assessment turns security from an act of faith into a discipline with metrics: coverage you can report to leadership, gaps you can prioritize, progress you can demonstrate. It changes the conversation from 'are we secure' to 'here is exactly where we stand and what closing the next gap costs.'
The hard part, and the patent's real work, is making the quantification honest — a metric that's easy to game or that measures the wrong thing is worse than none, because it creates false confidence. But the principle is increasingly central to mature security programs: defense managed by measurement, with the assessment automated so it stays current rather than living in a once-a-year audit.