OpenVAS

OpenVAS (Open Vulnerability Assessment Scanner) is the open-source scanning engine at the heart of the Greenbone Vulnerability Management (GVM) framework. It provides enterprise-grade vulnerability assessment capabilities without commercial licensing costs, making it the go-to choice for organizations seeking powerful scanning on a budget and for security researchers who need full control over their tooling.

The scanner maintains a library of over 100,000 Network Vulnerability Tests (NVTs), updated daily through the Greenbone Community Feed. These tests cover a broad spectrum of vulnerabilities across operating systems, network services, web applications, databases, and industrial control systems. The NVTs are written in NASL (Nessus Attack Scripting Language), providing a well-documented framework for writing custom security checks.

OpenVAS operates within the larger GVM architecture, which includes the Greenbone Security Assistant (GSA) web interface, the GVM daemon (gvmd) for scan orchestration, and the OSP (Open Scanner Protocol) for communication between components. This modular architecture allows flexible deployment scenarios ranging from single-host installations to distributed scanning infrastructure with multiple scan nodes.