Special Negative Severity Values in Greenbone OpenVAS

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1

Hello team,

From documentation we found the below for the Severity Score:
“A severity score is a decimal number between 0.0 and 10.0 (inclusive) with one digit after the decimal point or a special negative value (-1.0, -2.0 or -3.0). If a single severity score defines a constraint, e.g. on whether an override applies, for values 0.0 and lower the severity must be equal to match while for > 0.0 the compared value must be greater or equal.”

Unfortunately, I was not able to spot somewhere in documentation what is the meaning of the special negative severity values?

Any idea about this? Maybe some links that provide explanation?

Thank you!!

2

Negative severity values are used for special cases such as false positive results or error messages.

For details you can have a look at the corresponding code at gvmd/src/manage_utils.h at b8f5561e5a9ee3b54bf9bfe0011018efe5a20cb3 · greenbone/gvmd · GitHub.

I’ll also check whether we can improve the API documentation in the future.

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3

Thank you @Martin,

So based on the code, we don’t have severity score -2 right?

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Currently not, no. It used to be for debug messages, see gvmd/src/manage_utils.h at 195c64e4216a762ecda0d6664c06df425a7565ea · greenbone/gvmd · GitHub, but was removed for GVM 21.04 (we are at 22.04 currently). I cannot recall the reason at the moment.

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