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OpenVAS (Greenbone)

Network vulnerability scanner (Greenbone Community Edition)

Scanner engine of the Greenbone Community Edition, running network vulnerability tests from the Greenbone community feed against hosts and services.

Open sourceGPL-2.0-only
Alternative toTenable NessusQualys VMDR
Visit website View repository Docs
Homepage of OpenVAS (Greenbone)
Official website (openvas.org), captured by ThreatWire.

What OpenVAS (Greenbone) does

OpenVAS is the scanner component of the Greenbone Community Edition. It executes vulnerability tests (written in NASL) from the Greenbone Community Feed, covering authenticated and unauthenticated checks against operating systems, network services and applications.

The scanner is usually deployed with the other Greenbone components (the vulnerability manager gvmd and the web interface GSA), most easily through the official container setup. Greenbone also sells an enterprise feed and appliances; the community edition and feed remain free.

Key features

  • Network vulnerability tests from the Greenbone Community Feed
  • Authenticated and unauthenticated scanning
  • Scheduling and reporting through the Greenbone stack
  • Container-based community deployment
  • Newer Rust-based scanner components developed in the same repository

Licence

GPL-2.0-only · GNU GPL v2 · Open source

Checked by ThreatWire against the repository's licence file on 2026-10-20. GitHub detects: GPL-2.0.

Security of OpenVAS (Greenbone) itself

No published advisory found for OpenVAS (Greenbone) in GitHub repository advisories. That does not mean the tool has no vulnerabilities.

Sources: GitHub repository advisories · checked 2026-10-20.

Categories and tags

Vulnerability scanningNetwork scanning and analysis#network-scanner#greenbone#nasl#openvas#vulnerability#vulnerability-scanners#vulnerability-detection#vulnerability-assessment#scanner

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