I’ve found that consistent CVSS scoring is practically impossible, both because many criteria are defined in ambiguous or confusing ways, and because rating any obvious knock-on effects is proscribed by the official scoring rules[0][1].
For example, if a software component has a vulnerability which allows an attacker to steal admin credentials by exfiltrating a password file, the fact that this would allow the attacker to then have admin access to do whatever they wanted in other software that shares credentials doesn’t matter when calculating the core score of the vulnerability. (As a user, you would need to calculate the “environmental score” in the calculator[2] to decide what your score is given whatever configuration you/your company uses.)
Additionally, if some software enables privilege escalation at the OS level by misusing APIs, this escalation is not a “scope change” unless the software tried to create a separate security authority for itself by having some form of sandbox or authentication, so a vulnerability of this kind in software that has no added security mechanisms at all will be scored lower than a vulnerability in software which has implemented some additional access control which was bypassed.
I’m not saying that the limits are nonsensical since without them you’d end up with a whole lot of Critical base scores, but in my limited experience the CVSS core score is pretty worthless when it comes to getting a sense of how bad a vulnerability actually is and I don’t know how security analysts cope with this system.
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2020-15228
So what is it? High, Moderate, or Low? Super confusing