OpenVAS
The Open Vulnerability Assessment System (OpenVAS) is a framework of several services and tools offering a comprehensive and powerful vulnerability scanning and vulnerability management solution.
OpenVAS is a framework of several services and tools. The core of this SSL-secured service-oriented architecture is the OpenVAS Scanner. The scanner very efficiently executes the actual Network Vulnerability Tests (NVTs) which are served with daily updates via the OpenVAS NVT Feed or via a commercial feed service.
The OpenVAS Manager is the central service that consolidates plain vulnerability scanning into a full vulnerability management solution. The Manager controls the Scanner via OTP (OpenVAS Transfer Protocol) and itself offers the XML-based, stateless OpenVAS Management Protocol (OMP). All intelligence is implemented in the Manager so that it is possible to implement various lean clients that will behave consistently e.g. with regard to filtering or sorting scan results. The Manager also controls a SQL database (sqlite-based) where all configuration and scan result data is centrally stored.
A couple of different OMP clients are available: The Greenbone Security Assistant (GSA) is a lean web service offering a user interface for web browsers. GSA uses XSL transformation stylesheet that converts OMP responses into HTML.
The Greenbone Security Desktop (GSD) is a Qt-based desktop client for OMP. It runs on various Linux, Windows and other operating systems.
OpenVAS CLI contains the command line tool "omp" which allows to create batch processes to drive OpenVAS Manager.
The OpenVAS project maintains a public feed of Network Vulnerability Tests (NVTs). It contains more than 25,000 NVTs (May 2012), growing on a daily basis. This feed is configured as the default for OpenVAS.
All OpenVAS products are Free Software. Most components are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL).