Notus Scanner

Notus Scanner detects vulnerable products in a system environment. The scanning method is to evaluate internal system information. It does this very fast and even detects currently inactive products because it does not need to interact with each of the products.

To report about vulnerabilities, Notus Scanner receives collected system information on the one hand and accesses the vulnerability information from the feed service on the other. Both input elements are in table form: the system information is specific to each environment and the vulnerability information is specific to each system type.

Notus Scanner integrates into the Greenbone Vulnerability Management framework which allows to let it scan entire networks within a single task. Any vulnerability test in the format of .notus files inside the Greenbone Feed will be considered and automatically matched with the scanned environments.

A system environment can be the operating system of a host. But it could also be containers like Docker or virtual machines. Neither of these need to be actively running for scanning.

The Notus Scanner is implemented in Python and published under an Open Source license. Greenbone Networks maintains and extends it since it is embedded in the Greenbone Professional Edition as well as in the Greenbone Cloud Services.

Greenbone also keeps the vulnerability information up-to-date via the feed on a daily basis. The .notus format specification is open and part of the documentation.

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Development
• Support
• Maintainer
• Contributing
• License

Installation

Python 3.10 and later is supported.

For further information about installation and configuration read install description.

Development

notus-scanner uses poetry for its own dependency management and build process.

First install poetry via pip

python3 -m pip install --user poetry

Afterwards run

poetry install

in the checkout directory of notus-scanner (the directory containing the pyproject.toml file) to install all dependencies including the packages only required for development.

For development activate the git hooks for auto-formatting and linting via autohooks.

poetry run autohooks activate

Validate the activated git hooks by running

poetry run autohooks check

Support

For any question on the usage of Notus Scanner 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.

License

Copyright (C) 2021-2024 Greenbone AG

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