How to run a standalone scanner?

Hello everyone,

I am considering moving from our Nessus based setup to a similar architecture built upon OpenVAS.

The specificity of our installation is that we rely on scanners to perform teh actual scan but all the oter operations are managed by our backend software:

  • choice of targets
  • start of a scan on a scanner
  • retrieval of the results
  • parsing and further management of the vulnerabilities

Would such an approach work with OpenVAS?

When reading the documentation, it looks like the optimal way would be to just run the scanners and connect to their APIs. Is there documentation for these specific - scanner-centric APIs?

The point I am trying to make is that OpenVAS seems to be on the one hand a set of independent tools, but everything I could read is linked to the Greenbone stack.

Thank you for any pointers or recommendations

Well, the scanner and the libs are also being developed by Greenbone, so it all is part of the Greenbone stack.

The scanner has an internal protocol called OTP. It is not an official API and thus subject to change for internal purposes without notice. Eventually OTP will be gone. At the moment using GMP via the manager daemon is a well-defined and supported option. The manager daemon implemented OTP client functionality. Future GVM-11 likely will use OSP.

It is also possible to use the command line tool “openvas-nasl” for some purposes, but no sure it matches your concept. We primarily use it for testing single vulnerability tests.

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