Performance analysis of SNMP over SSH

Abstract

There have been several attempts in the past to secure the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). Version 3 of the SNMP protocol introduced a User-based Security Model (USM) which comes with its own user and key-management infrastructure. However, many operators are reluctant to introduce a new user and key management infrastructure just to secure SNMP. This paper describes how the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol can be used to secure SNMP and it provides a performance analysis of a prototype implementation which compares the performance of SNMP over SSH with other secure and insecure versions of SNMP. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2006.