SNMPv3

The InfoSec team at our organization has been pushing for the use of SNMPv3 over the older variants. This brought me an opportunity to learn more about this topic and here I share some of my learnings.


First, thing -> SNMP = Simple Network Management Protocol. 


There are three famous version -> SNMPv1, SNMPv2c (these 2 have little to no security), & SNMPv3 which is very secure.

So, why SNMP? 

Say, we're starting a new company, this company requires 50 servers, 20 switches, & 10 routers to keep its internet services up & running. To find the health about individual devices would involves logging into the console of each device which in this case is about 80 devices which would take a few days. Wouldn't it be nicer if we could have each device send health metrics to a centralized server location? A

h-ha! That's where SNMP comes in to our rescue. SNMP is an Application level protocol that uses UDP port 161 to send device diagnostics information to a server, this server that is our central location is known as the manager. There's an Agent running on the device that we want to send diagnostics from, this Agent polls the device for information that it sends to the manager.

Network management station (NMS) is another name for the manager.

Another term that you would come across often is the Management Information Base (MIB). MIBs contain Object Identifiers (OIDs), think of there are universally unique IDs for various endpoints provided by the device.

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