OpenVAS Connector

OpenVAS Connector is a Python module used to manage OpenVAS Servers using the OpenVAS Management Protocol (OMP) 7.0 through the OpenVAS Command Line Interface (OpenVAS-CLI). It was implemented as part of my thesis because the official OpenVAS Python module (openvas.omplib) was not compatible with most recent versions of the OMP nor with Python 3 and I could not find better alternatives at the time.

Not all OMP features are implemented in the module for now as this Python library was meant to be used as a tool for this dissertation in the first place, however it should be easily extendable. The current version of the OpenVAS Connector allows the user to:

• Create new alerts, targets or tasks;
• Get alerts, configurations, port lists, reports, results, tasks or targets. The get methods can use a filter to obtain only specific objects or no filters to get all available, e.g. get_target() returns all available targets while get_target(filter=’name="SmallCo Network"’) only returns the target named “SmallCo Network”;
• Get a delta report of the two last reports generated, if only one report exists it returns it. A delta report is a report based on the difference between two reports of the same task. With a delta report it is possible to determine which results are new, modified, the same or gone. This is used by the script to avoid duplicated events from the same result.
• Lock the execution of the current thread until a previously defined alert in OpenVAS is fired by a task. This is used by the script to wait for the OpenVAS scan to finish.

Getting Started

To use this module:

• All the prequisites must be installed;
• The file openvas_connector.py must be in the project directory;
• A configuration file of OMP must be created (~/omp.config).

Prerequisites

• OpenVAS Scanner 4.0 (or higher)
• OMP 7.0
• Python 3.4 (or higher)
• LXML

pip install lxml

Configuration file of OMP

The configuration file ~/omp.config is used to store connection parameter like host, port, username and password.

An exemplary configuration file looks like

[Connection]
host=localhost
port=9390
username=exampleuser
password=examplepassword

References

• OpenVAS
• OpenVAS Scanner
• OpenVAS Management Protocol (OMP) 7.0
• OpenVAS CLI
• LXML

Contributing

Feel free to contribute and add yourself to the Authors section. All commits to the master branch are reviewed before approval. There is currently no automated testing in place and I am not actively contributing so approvals might take a while.

Versioning

We use SemVer for versioning. For the versions available, see the tags on this repository.

Authors

• João Machado - Initial work - jm4c

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details