Greenbone Vulnerability Scanning on Proxmox

Greenbone on Proxmox

I want to run a vulnerability scanner from my Proxmox instance. Greenbone provides a solution, but its native format is meant for VirtualBox or VMware. In this blog, we are going to upload the OVA image to Proxmox and adjust it to be compatible with our system.

Requirements:

Proxmox with SSH access

Software

Greenbone virtual box
OVA image

Outcomes

Understanding of vulnerabilities in your environment
VM appliance running on proxmox environment (Offloading from desktop environment)

Step #1: Translate to OVA

Download a copy of the Greenbone OVA image on the internet

https://www.greenbone.net/en/openvas-free

You need to copy the ova image over to proxmox using scp

scp Greenbone-Enterprise-TRIAL-24.10.2-VirtualBox.ova root@[Enter your IP]:/var/lib/vz/

Navigate to your proxmox host shell

cd /var/lib/vz
tar -xvf Greenbone-Enterprise-TRIAL-24.10.2-VirtualBox.ova

Now go create a new VM within Proxmox. When you get to the OS and hard drive, do not add any media type.

Go back to your proxmox disk and run the following command to import the hard drive

qm importdisk 102 qm importdisk 102 Greenbone-Enterprise-TRIAL-24.10.2-VirtualBox-disk001.vmdk local-lvm

Now attach the disk to the Virtual Machine

qm set 102 --scsihw virtio-scsi-pci --scsi0 local-lvm:vm-103-disk-0

Set boot order correctly

qm set 102 --boot order=scsi0

Set BIOS mode to UEFI

qm set 102 --bios ovmf
qm set 102 --efidisk0 local-lvm:0,format=raw

Start the machine

qm start 102

Step #2: Configure the VM

Create a user

Just select skip unless you are going to use the enterprise appliance

Step #3: Login and run a new scan

Now navigate to your web broswer interface and type in the IP address of the Greenbone appliance

You can start a quick scan by going to the scan tasks advanced task wizard (The wand in the top left corner) typing an IP or LAN subnet and starting the scan

After the scan is complete, you can review it’s results by going to scan > reports

Sam Tanner