Greenbone Vulnerability Manager

The Greenbone Vulnerability Manager is the central management service between security scanners and the user clients.

It manages the storage of any vulnerability management configurations and of the scan results. Access to data, control commands and workflows is offered via the XML-based Greenbone Management Protocol (GMP). Controlling scanners like the OPENVAS Scanner* is done via the Open Scanner Protocol (OSP).

• Releases
• Installation and Usage
• Support
• Maintainer
• Contributing
  • Code style and formatting
  • CMake formatting
• License

Releases

All release files are signed with the Greenbone Community Feed integrity key. This gpg key can be downloaded at https://www.greenbone.net/GBCommunitySigningKey.asc and the fingerprint is 8AE4 BE42 9B60 A59B 311C 2E73 9823 FAA6 0ED1 E580.

Installation and Usage

This module can be configured, built and installed with following commands:

cmake .
make install

For detailed installation requirements and instructions, please see the file INSTALL.md. The file also contains instructions for setting up gvmd and for connecting gvmd to vulnerability scanners and to the GSA web interface.

In case everything was installed using the defaults, then starting the manager daemon can be done with this simple command:

gvmd

To see all available command line options of gvmd enter this command:

gvmd --help

If you are not familiar or comfortable building from source code, we recommend that you use the Greenbone Enterprise TRIAL, a prepared virtual machine with a readily available setup. Information regarding the virtual machine is available at https://www.greenbone.net/en/testnow.

Configuration

The configuration of gvmd is handled via the following methods:

• Settings that can be changed globally via the --modify-setting command line option.
• Command line options given to the main gvmd process when starting it.
• A configuration file (gvmd.conf) that is located in ${GVM_SYSCONF_DIR} (etc/gvm in the given installation prefix for the default build setup).

Authentication options

Options for the GMP authentication can be found in [authentication] section of the config file. These are:

Config file key	Environment variable	Type	Default value	Description
jwt_access_duration	GVMD_JWT_ACCESS_DURATION	integer	60	Lifetime of access tokens issued by gvmd in seconds
jwt_decode_secret	GVMD_JWT_DECODE_SECRET	string		Secret to decode / verify JWTs
jwt_decode_secret_path	GVMD_JWT_DECODE_SECRET_PATH	file path		Path to the secret to decode / verify JWTs
jwt_encode_secret	GVMD_JWT_ENCODE_SECRET	string		Secret to encode / generate JWTs
jwt_encode_secret_path	GVMD_JWT_ENCODE_SECRET_PATH	file path		Path to the secret to encode / generate JWTs
jwt_secret_type	GVMD_JWT_SECRET_TYPE	string		Type of secret to use for JWT signatures

For gvmd to be able to verify JSON web tokens in the <authenticate> GMP command, both the JWT secret type and a decode secret must be given. For it to be able to generate JWTs, the secret type and an encode secret must be given. The supported secret types are ECDSA, RSA and shared.

Feature flags

The [features] section of the configuration file and the corresponding environment variables are used to enable optional features as long as they also have been enabled at build time.

For a list of the feature flags and more information see the separate feature flags documentation.

Support

For any question on the usage of gvmd please use the Greenbone Community Forum. If you found a problem with the software, please create an issue on GitHub. If you are a Greenbone customer you may alternatively or additionally forward your issue to the Greenbone Support Portal.

Maintainer

This project is maintained by Greenbone AG.

Contributing

Your contributions are highly appreciated. Please create a pull request on GitHub. Bigger changes need to be discussed with the development team via the issues section at GitHub first.

Code style and formatting

Before creating a pull request, it is recommended to run the following command:

make format

This reformats the new code to ensure that it follows the code style and formatting guidelines.

CMake formatting

All CMake files are formatted using gersemi. To install gersemi on a Debian based system the following commands can be used:

sudo apt install pipx
pipx install gersemi

To format all CMake files run the command:

gersemi -i cmake .

License

Copyright (C) 2009-2026 Greenbone AG

Licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later.