Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Objectives: Risk Management has been recognized as a critical issue in computer infrastructures, especially in medium to large scale organizations and enterprises. The goal of this research report is to provide a practical comprehensive virtual machine based framework for assessing the performance of vulnerability scanners applied to such enterprises, focused to small and medium size ones towards a risk evaluation analysis. Moreover, the purpose of this paper is to compare three of the most well-known free vulnerability scanners (Nessus, OpenVAS, Nmap Scripting Engine) with regards to how they can be used to systematise the process of Risk Assessment in an enterprise, based on the herein presented experimental evaluation framework involving virtual machine testing. Method: The proposed methodology is based on developing a framework for suitable setup and usage of virtual machines making risk analysis practical and being capable of comparing different vulnerability scanners. Findings: The herein developed framework is shown to be efficient with regards to comparison and selection of candidate risk analysis software with easily accessed and affordable infrastructure. Novelty: Although there might be few other similar comparisons of vulnerability scanners in the literature, the main herein contribution is the provision of a practical and above all easily reproducible framework for small business enterprises to establish proper selection procedures of such security software without spending a lot of money for expensive testing infrastructure.

Keywords: Vulnerability Scanning; risk assessment; nessus; OpenVAS; Nmap scripting engine