Security Analysis And Practice On SNMP Protocol

Network technology is developing rapidly, which leads to a network with greater scale, more complex structure and more users. Many security problems emerge with the growing of Internet. In some special areas, there are less effective protecting mechanisms for information transmission in networks due to the poor security in network management, resulting in great losses. From analyzing the potential reasons, it is easy to see that the poor security in network management is a main cause that leads to security problems. Therefore, how to implement a highly effective and secure network management is an important problem.In the current network architecture, SNMP has become the real standard. So the security of SNMP plays an important role in the security of whole network. This paper analyzes the potential security problems related with SNMP security mechanisms. According to security requirements of network management in a military unit in which the network management system is vulnerable to eavesdropping, playback, counterfeiting, tampering and other attacks, the paper proposes a network management model based on SNMPv3. Security tests are conducted on three different versions of SNMP. The test results show the different security level with different versions of SNMP. Finally, the deployment of SNMPv3 and its developing direction are concluded.