Setting up GVM-OpenVAS — 2020 (Open Vulnerability Assessment Scanner)

Lately I wanted to install OpenVAS and realized that there are many changes that have been made to the older version. It was quite a while since I had used this tool.

My Failure attempt:

1. Tried to install from source and it is a cumbersome process — Nope
2. Found few docker images, but were obsolete
3. Back to step 1 but had problem with updating NVT-FEED — Frustrated
4. Back to step2 and found few docker images which was not great — Issues!!

Found success with this docker image, Finally!! Huh!! Thank you Admirito. ❤

admirito/gvm-containers

Setting up this docker is pretty straight forward as mentioned in the github repo.

Why this gvm-container and latest GVM is brilliant?

1. You do not need to struggle with bringing it on the external interface. By default it runs on port 8080 on the external interface with default username and password admin/admin. Change this on your first login from GUI (No add allow host header issues :-P)
2. I used to struggle with downloading NVT feeds, but now it is all “rsync”. As far as you do not have DNS issue or network problem this works flawlessly.

Set up: OS does not matter as this is a docker installation. I tried it on Kali and Ubuntu.

Step 1: sudo apt-get install docker.io

Step 2 : sudo apt-get install docker-compose

Step 3 : git clone https://github.com/admirito/gvm-containers

Step 4 : cd gvm-containers

Step 5: docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f nvt-sync.yml -f cert-sync.yml -f scap-sync.yml up

Thats it!! Keep staring at the screen till the NVT-feed syncs.

Troubleshooting:

1. greenbone-nvt-sync do not download and stopped at some point. Solution: This must be a network issue. However if you want to run “greenbone-nvt-sync” command, try following commands.

docker container ls

#docker exec -it <openvas_container_name> /bin/bash

Once you get the root shell of the container, try

#greenbone-nvt-sync

If there is an error pertaining to “greenbone-nvt-sync another process related to the feed update is already running” then

#rm -rf /run/feed*.lock

#greenbone-nvt-sync

2. If the above troubleshoot does not resolve the issue, then remove the dockers and try reinstalling it again with docker-compose. To remove the running docker containers

#docker container stop $(docker container ps -aq)

#docker container rm $(docker container ps -aq)

To remove docker images for some reason

docker images (This will list the docker images)

#docker rmi <image1_id> <image2_id>…

I am pretty sure if there is no network or DNS resolution issue, your docker gvm installation will be working just fine.

Have any queries reach me out at https://twitter.com/adb_root

Thanks for reading :-)