The Implementation of a Portable Vulnerability Assessment Scanner

Abstract

Traditional vulnerability assessment (VA) scanner is high cost and high-power consumption. This project is to implement a low cost, efficient and portable vulnerability assessment scanner in an open-source single-board microcomputer by installing an open-source vulnerability assessment scanning software, OpenVAS into an Orange Pi. This project also implements a single web server to control all the VA scanners through the OpenVAS Management Protocol (OMP). To implement OpenVAS into an Orange Pi, the method of compiling from source to the operating system, Ubuntu Server is used. It is because the official website only provides binary packages which only support X86 and AMD CPU architectures, and Orange Pi do not use either one of them. To implement a single web server, JavaScript is used for programming, and Node.js® is used for JavaScript runtime built. The web server can control all the OpenVAS servers, for example, Orange Pi, by also programming in JavaScript with Node.js®. The web server can distribute scanning targets to every OpenVAS servers, and it can retrieve scanning reports from a particular OpenVAS server by looking for the MySQL database server. The report will be displayed on the browser in HTML format. Therefore, administrators can manage all the VA scanners easily and efficiently.