System for Vulnerability Management on Greenbone

Greenbone is a widely used open-source vulnerability management system that provides comprehensive security analyses for IT environments. The resulting XML-based security reports form the foundation of SecDash—so we begin with a brief introduction to their structure.

This project follows a standardized, native XML schema. At a high level, they contain:

• Top level: a <report> element with metadata (e.g., task, scan start/end, status) and aggregated sections.
• Results: <results><result>…</result>…</results> containing the individual findings.
• Host context: a <host> element (IP address, optional DNS/hostname) and, where available, optional <asset> metadata.
• Port/service: a <port> string (e.g., 443/tcp or a generic entry for non-port-specific checks).
• Vulnerability test (VT): a <nvt oid="…"> element with fields such as <name>, <family>, <cvss_base>, <cvss_base_vector>, <cves>, <refs>, and <tags>.
• Severity: <severity> as a numeric (CVSS-based) value and <threat> as a categorical label (e.g., Log, Low, Medium, High, Critical)

XML is the canonical, machine-friendly format. The aim of this project is to build an infrastructure that makes the essential contents of these reports intuitively accessible and readable for humans. To achieve this, we chose a Docker-based deployment and Grafana dashboards for visualization.