The GPL-licensed Open Vulnerability Assessment System (OpenVAS) has become the Open Source Network Vulnerability Scanner. It is complemented with the largest open collection of vulnerability tests, the daily updated OpenVAS NVT Feed with over 15,500 Network Vulnerability Tests (NVTs).

Exactly 1 year after version 2.0.0 was released, the new 3.0 generation introduces:

* A new internal architecture of the modules
* NVT Meta Information that is free of arbitrary size limits
* IPv6 support
* WMI clients support
* Supports upcoming optional extensions:
o OpenVAS Manager for storing and organizing scans on a central server in a SQL database
o OpenVAS Administrator for User-, Feed- and Settings-Management
o Greenbone Security Assistent for a web-based Vulnerability Management

The Greenbone Security Assistant is an interesting inclusion that I am hoping to doing some thorough testing with.

It is great to see that development of OpenVas continues to improve and extend this excellent vulnerability scanning solution. Last year Tenable released Nessus in a version 4.2 that moved the client into a flash / web based model, the latest version of Nessus works well; so now I look forward to testing this latest version of OpenVas and perhaps even finally doing that Nessus vs OpenVas review I have been promising.