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.Scanning OpenVAS. OpenVAS is a vulnerability assessment tool that that actually shares its history with another product on this list, Nessus. It was forked from Nessus back in 2005 as Nessus was. Free & super-fast Wi-Fi scanner for your home network. Bitdefender Home Scanner looks for vulnerable devices and passwords, and offers detailed security recommendations for your home network. Stop hackers and privacy intruders from taking advantage of security holes to log on to your home network. Web Cookies Scanner is a free all-in-one security tool suitable for scanning web applications. It can search for vulnerabilities and privacy issues on HTTP cookies, Flash applets, HTML5 localStorage, sessionStorage, Supercookies, and Evercookies. The tool also offers a free URL malware scanner and an HTTP, HTML, and SSL/TLS vulnerability scanner. Best free Vulnerability Scanner Software across 24 Vulnerability Scanner Software products. See reviews of Nessus, BurpSuite, Acunetix Vulnerability Scanner and compare free or paid products easily. Get the G2 on the right Vulnerability Scanner Software for you.
OpenVAS is a full-featured vulnerability scanner. Its capabilitiesinclude unauthenticated testing, authenticated testing, various highlevel and low level Internet and industrial protocols, performance tuningfor large-scale scans and a powerful internal programming languageto implement any type of vulnerability test.
The scanner is accompanied by a vulnerability tests feedwith a long history and daily updates. ThisGreenbone Community Feedincludes more than 80,000 vulnerability tests.
The scanner is developed and maintained byGreenbone Networkssince 2009. The works are contributed as Open Source to the communityunder the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL).
Greenbone develops OpenVAS as part of their commercial vulnerability managementproduct family 'Greenbone Security Manager' (GSM). OpenVAS is one element in alarger architecture. In combination with additional Open Source modules, it forms theGreenbone Vulnerability Managementsolution.Based on this, the GSM appliances use a more extensive feed covering enterprise needs, a GVM with additionalfeatures, appliance management and a service level agreement.
In 2005, the developers of the vulnerability scanner Nessus decidedto discontinue the work under Open Source licenses and switch toa proprietary business model.
At this point, developers from Intevationand DN-Systems (the two companies which would later found Greenbone Networks)already contributeddevelopments to Nessus, focussing on client tools. The works were primarily supportedby the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) In 2006, several forks of Nessus were created as a reaction to the discontinuation of the Open Source solution.Of these forks, only one continued to show activity: OpenVAS, the Open Vulnerability Assessment System.OpenVAS was registered as a project at Software in the Public Interest, Inc.to hold and protect the domain 'openvas.org'. |
The years 2006 and 2007 had little activity beyond clean-ups of the status quo.But in late 2008, the company Greenbone Networks GmbH,based in Osnabrück, Germany was founded to push forward OpenVAS.Essentially, Greenbone's business plan was about 3 cornerstones:
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Also in 2008, two further companies became active, Secpodfrom India and Security Space from Canada.Both of them had a focus on contributing vulnerability tests, and teamed upwith Greenbone to start producing a reliable and up-to-date feed of vulnerability tests.This started with removing any source code and vulnerability tests where the licensewas not clear or not compatible. Several thousands of vulnerability testswere eliminated for a clean starting point. Shortly after this, the feed contentwas growing quickly and steadily. |
In 2009, Greenbone added the first additional modules to build a vulnerability management solution.The web interface and the central management service were developed from scratch, defining genericprotocols as their API.At the same time, the OpenVAS scanner was carefully improved, and quickly lost compatibilitywith its ancestor. All the Open Sourceworks were published under the brand 'OpenVAS'. The first 'Greenbone Security Manager'appliance products entered the market in the spring of 2010.
In the years 2010 to 2016, the commercial product was systematically improved and extended,and so were the Open Source modules as well. The vulnerability management was extendedto carry daily updated security advisories, contributed to the public with a GPL-compatible licensefrom German CERTs DFN-CERT and CERT-Bund,a division at the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI)who supported OpenVAS in various ways over these years. |
In March 2017, the so-called OpenVAS framework reached version 9. Many new modules and numerousfeatures were added during the release cycles. Some hundred thousands lines of code were producedand there was almost no day without a couple of published code improvements by a growing developer team.
The year 2017 marked the beginning of a new era: First of all, Greenbone became visible as thedriving force behind OpenVAS, reducing the brand confusion. This includedseveral activities, the most essential one the renaming of the 'OpenVAS framework' to'Greenbone Vulnerability Management' (GVM), of which the OpenVAS Scanner is one of many modules.It also lead to 'GVM-10' as the successor of 'OpenVAS-9'. No license changes happened, all modules remainedOpen Source.
The second big change in 2017 was about the feed service. Apart from the branding confusion, severalcompanies were integrating the technology and feed and passing it off as their workor claiming to be an alternative to Greenbone's productat a better price. Only a minority of them properly complied with the GPL licenses. None of them cooperates withGreenbone commercially. For achieving better visibility, less misunderstanding andbetter distinction from other OpenVAS-based products, the public feed was renamed to 'Greenbone Community Feed'and the feed development was internalized. Furthermore, the release scheme changed from a14-days delay to a daily publication without delay where now vulnerability tests for enterprise products arenot included anymore.
The third big change towards the new era was the transition to a modern infrastructure, namely GitHub anda community forum. The whole transition was completed in 2018 and boosted both productivity and community activity.
In 2019 the branding separation was completed. OpenVAS now represents the actual vulnerability scanner asit did originally and the 'S' in 'OpenVAS' now stands for 'Scanner' rather than 'System'.These changes are accompanied by an updated OpenVAS logo.The framework where OpenVAS is embedded is the Greenbone Vulnerability Management (GVM).
OpenVAS released with GVM-10 receives numerous performance optimization to address thechallenge of a growing number of vulnerability tests, scanning target networks of increasing size andheterogeneity.
OpenVAS released with GVM-11 introduces substantial architectural changes: The former service 'openvassd' is turnedinto a command line tool 'openvas'. It is controlled by the service layerospd-openvas. This concept essentially replacesthe old stateful, permanent and proprietry OTP (OpenVAS Transfer Protocol) by the new state-less,request-response XML-based and generic OSP (Open Scanner Protocol).
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You found a security issue in one of our software modules, products or services?We want to fix it! Please inform our Security Response Team viasecurity@greenbone.net.
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