Plugins for Greenbone Vulnerability Management are written in the Nessus Attack Scripting Language, NASL.

Greenbone Vulnerability Manager began under the name of OpenVAS, and before that the name GNessUs, as a fork of the previously open source Nessus scanning tool, after its developers Tenable Network Security changed it to a proprietary (closed source) license in October 2005.

Greenbone Vulnerability Manager is a member project of Software in the Public Interest.

[7] There is a daily updated feed of Network Vulnerability Tests (NVTs).

[8] The OpenVAS protocol structure aims to be well-documented to assist developers.