☑️OpenVAS
OpenVAS, by Greenbone Networks, is a publicly available vulnerability scanner. Greenbone Networks has an entire Vulnerability Manager, part of which is the OpenVAS scanner. Greenbone's Vulnerability Manager is also open to the public and free to use. OpenVAS has the capabilities to perform network scans, including authenticated and unauthenticated testing.
Installation
sudo apt-get update && apt-get -y full-upgrade
sudo apt-get install gvm && openvas
gvm-setup
gvm-startScanning
Before setting up any scans, it is best to configure the targets for the scan. If you navigate to the Configurations tab and select Targets, you will see targets that have been already added to the application.
To add your own, click the icon highlighted below and add an individual target or a host list. You also can configure other options such as the ports, authentication, and methods of identifying if the host is reachable. For the Alive Test, the Scan Config Default option from OpenVAS leverages the NVT Ping Host in the NVT Family. You can learn about the NVT Family here.
Typically, an authenticated scan leverages a high privileged user such as root or Administrator. Depending on the permission level for the user, if it's the highest permission level, you'll retrieve the maximum amount of information back from the host in regards to the vulnerabilities present since you would have full access.
Multiple scan configurations leverage OpenVAS Network Vulnerability Test (NVT) Families, which consist of many different categories of vulnerabilities, such as ones for Windows, Linux, Web Applications, etc. You can see a few different types of families shown below:
Base: This scan configuration is meant to enumerate information about the host's status and operating system information. This scan configuration does not check for vulnerabilities.
Discovery: This scan configuration is meant to enumerate information about the system. The configuration identifies the host's services, hardware, accessible ports, and software being used on the system. This scan configuration also does not check for vulnerabilities.
Host Discovery: This scan configuration solely tests whether the host is alive and determines what devices are active on the network. This scan configuration does not check for vulnerabilities as well. OpenVAS leverages ping to identify if the host is alive.
System Discovery: This scan enumerates the target host further than the 'Discovery Scan' and attempts to identify the operating system and hardware associated with the host.
Full and fast: This configuration is recommended by OpenVAS as the safest option and leverages intelligence to use the best NVT checks for the host(s) based on the accessible ports.
You can create your own scan by navigating to the 'Scans' tab and clicking the wizard icon.
Exporting Results
There are various export formats for reporting purposes, including XML, CSV, PDF, ITG, and TXT. If you choose to export your report out as an XML, you can leverage various XML parsers to view the data in an easier to read format.
We will export our results in XML and use the openvasreporting tool by the TheGroundZero.
This command will generate an excel document similar to the one below:
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