The Greenbone Security Assistant is the web interface developed for the Greenbone Enterprise appliances written in React.

• Releases
• Installation
• Developing
• Translations
  • Format
  • Updating
  • Support a new Language
• Settings
  • Config File
  • Config Variables
    • vendorVersion
    • vendorLabel
    • guestUsername and guestPassword
    • disableLoginForm
    • enableEPSS
    • enableStoreDebugLog
    • logLevel
    • timeout
    • apiServer
    • apiProtocol
    • manualUrl
    • manualLanguageMapping
    • protocolDocUrl
    • reloadInterval
    • reloadIntervalActive
    • reloadIntervalInactive
    • reportResultsThreshold
• Support
• Maintainer
• Contributing
• License

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.

Prerequisites for GSA:

• node.js >= 18.0

To install nodejs the following commands can be used

export VERSION=18
export KEYRING=/usr/share/keyrings/nodesource.gpg

curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/gpgkey/nodesource.gpg.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee "$KEYRING" >/dev/null
gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring "$KEYRING" --list-keys

echo "deb [signed-by=$KEYRING] https://deb.nodesource.com/node_$VERSION.x nodistro main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nodesource.list
echo "deb-src [signed-by=$KEYRING] https://deb.nodesource.com/node_$VERSION.x nodistro main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nodesource.list

sudo apt update && sudo apt install nodejs

Change into the gsa source directory and delete the possible existing build output directory.

cd path/to/gsa
rm -rf build

Install the JavaScript dependencies and start the build process. The build process creates a build directory with a production build of GSA. The build/img directory will contain images like logos and banners. The build/static directory will contain generated JavaScript and CSS files and additionally in the build/static/media directory SVG files for all icons will be found.

npm install
npm run build

All content of the production build can be shipped with every web server. For providing GSA via our gsad web server, the files need to be copied into the share/gvm/gsad/web/ subdirectory of your chosen CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX directory when building gsad. Normally this is set to /usr or /usr/local.

mkdir -p $INSTALL_PREFIX/share/gvm/gsad/web/
cp -r build/* $INSTALL_PREFIX/share/gvm/gsad/web/

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.

Using GSA requires to re-build the JavaScript bundle. This process is very time-consuming and therefore may be avoided during development. It is possible to run GSA in a special web development server. The development server can be started with:

cd path/to/gsa && npm run start

Afterwards the development web server is set up and a new browser window is opened at the URL http://127.0.0.1:8080, containing the GSA web application. When a JavaScript file of GSA in the src folder is changed, the browser window will reload automatically.

Besides the development server gsad needs to be running with CORS enabled.

gsad --http-cors="http://127.0.0.1:8080"

To be able to communicate with gsad, the web application needs to know the server URL. This can be accomplished by editing the path/to/gsa/public/config.js file. The following lines can be used for a local gsad running with HTTP on port 9392:

  config = {
    apiProtocol: 'http',
    apiServer: '127.0.0.1:9392',
  };

For HTTPS only the protocol property must be 'https' accordingly.

After changing the config.js file, the browser window should be reloaded manually.

For translations and internationalization i18next is used.

With our configuration of i18next the translations are stored in language specific JSON files. The existing translations can be found at the public/locales/ directory.

The translations are stored in the JSON files as key-value pairs with the key being the English string and the value the translation of the specific language. Not translated strings have an empty string “” as the value.

Example with German translations:

{
  "Create a new Tag": "Einen neuen Tag erstellen",
  "Create a new Target": "Ein neues Ziel erstellen",
  "Create a new Task": ""
}

To change or extend translations new values can be added to the specific JSON file, committed to git and finally uploaded through a pull request to GitHub.

But sometimes the UI changes and new English descriptions are added or existing ones have been rephrased. In this case the new keys must be extracted from the source code and added to the JSON files. This can be done by running

npm run i18n-extract

New translation strings are added with an empty string “” as default value. Therefore searching for empty strings will find the to be translated values. Keys with a _plural suffix can be ignored. They are just added for technical reasons and are unused.

If not all strings are translated at once the remaining empty strings would cause missing text in web UI. Therefore, the JSON files must be cleaned up before adding the changes to git and creating a pull request. To clean up the JSON files the following command can be used

npm run clean-up-translations

The currently supported languages are listed at src/gmp/locale/languages.js. If a new language should be available in the web UI, it needs an entry in this object. Additionally the corresponding language codes must be added to the babel config and cleanup script.

The behavior of GSA can be changed via settings. All of the settings can be adjusted via a config file. Some of the settings can be changed during runtime too. Some of them are persistent during reload, some are reset during reload.

This sections lists all settings and explains their behavior.

The config file is a normal JavaScript file (with a .js suffix). It is named config.js and will be loaded from the /usr/share/gvm/gsad/web/ (or /usr/local/share/gvm/gsad/web/) directory when using gsad for providing GSA e.g. in production environments.

During development when using the on-the-fly-transpiling JavaScript development server (via npm run start) the file is loaded from the public/ directory.

The config.js file must contain a global config object with settings as properties e.g.

config = {
  // javascript files in contrast to JSON files allow comments
  foo: 'bar',
}

It is evaluated in the GmpSettings object implemented in the gmpsettings.js file. The GmpSettings object is instantiated once for the GSA application

Allows to adjust the shown product version string at the Login and About pages.

Allows to adjust the product info image at the Login page. It must be a relative path e.g. foo.png. The path will be mapped to $INSTALL_PREFIX/share/gvm/gsad/web/img/ on production (with gsad) and gsa/public/img for the development server.

Both settings allow to login with a single click. This user has to be set up carefully. E.g. if this user is created with admin privileges it will have these permissions after login. Thus be careful when creating a guest user. If guestUsername is contained in the config.js file the Login as Guest button will be shown.

This setting allows to deactivate the username password form at the Login page. It can be used to deactivate login for normal users.

Enables the display of EPSS scores and percentiles in CVEs and NVTs.

The data required for this is not available in the feed yet, so this is disabled by default.

Changes to this settings are persistent during browser reload. If the value has been changed in the browser console e.g. via gmp.settings.enableStoreDebugLog = true the browser window needs to be reloaded to apply this setting. The setting can be true, false or undefined.

If either enableStoreDebugLog is true or it is undefined and logLevel is debug the changes of the redux store are shown. The store contains all data visible to the user.

The value of logLevel is persistent during browser reload. If the value has been changed e.g. by running gmp.settings.logLevel = 'debug' in the browser console the browser window needs to be reloaded to apply this setting. Also this setting must be reset via gmp.settings.logLevel = undefined to not display the debug logs anymore and to use the default setting again. If logLevel is set to 'debug' and enableStoreDebugLog is not false the store debug logs are shown too.

This setting specifies as timeout after a data request to our API provided by gsad will fail. Default is 5 minutes (300000 ms).

Defaults to window.location.host. It contains the domain/IP address of the gsad server including the port e.g. '192.168.10.123:9392'.

Defaults to window.location.protocol and must be either 'http' or 'https'.

URL to the manual. On a Greenbone Enterprise Appliance the manuals are served locally and the value is the relative URL '/manual'. The URL is used for all links from help icons pointing to a page at the user manual.

Because we could possibly have a different number of translated manuals then available locales, a setting for mapping a locale to a corresponding translated manual is provided. If a current locale isn't mapped it always falls back to the English (en) locale.

This setting contains the URL to the public Greenbone Management Protocol (GMP) documentation. It is https://docs.greenbone.net/API/GMP/gmp-22.4.html and only used at the About page.

The standard interval for reloading data. The default is 15 seconds (15000 ms).

This interval is used for reloading data on pages with an active process. This is currently the case for a task list page, task details page, report list page and report details page containing at least one actively scanning task. The default is 3 seconds (3000 ms).

This interval is used instead of reloadInterval or reloadIntervalActive for reloading data when GSA is not the active browser window or tab. The default is 60 seconds (60000 ms).

If the number of filtered results of a shown report extends this threshold only the report without details is loaded and an information panel is show at the Hosts, Ports, Applications, Operating Systems, CVEs, Close CVEs and TLS Certificates tabs to prompt the user for lowering the number of results by additional filtering. This setting can be used to improve the responsiveness of the report details page.

For any question on the usage of gsa please use the Greenbone Community Portal. 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.

This project is maintained by Greenbone AG.

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.

Copyright (C) 2009-2023 Greenbone AG

Licensed under the AGPL-3.0 GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later.