This looks interesting. I have been looking for a solution to this problem without any clear conclusions so far. Nessus and Qualys have new agent-based scanners now, but I have not tested them because they both only support Red Hat-based Linux distros.

It sounds like for most software you are using the Ubuntu package management system to check for vulnerable versions. Is that correct? And are you planning to add detection for binaries that live outside of the distro package manager? I am thinking of stuff like custom-compiled Nginx binaries for example. I realize it would be non-trivial to implement this but would consider it highly useful at least for a certain set of common software components.