Internet Info 1994 March/Internet Info CD-ROM (Walnut Creek) (March 1994).iso/inet/ietf/snmpsec/snmpsec-minutes-91jul.txt

Text File | 1993-02-17 | 9.1 KB | 220 lines

CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_


Reported by James Galvin/TIS and Keith McCloghrie/Hughes

SNMPSEC Minutes

Status of the Documents Reviewed:

   o All three:  the SNMP Administrative Framework, SNMP Security
     Protocols, and SNMP Party MIB, were published as Internet Drafts
     immediately after the previous IETF (in St.  Louis).

   o An update to the SNMP Party MIB was distributed to the snmp-sec-dev
     mailing-list at the beginning of July.


The Outstanding Issues were Discussed:


   o Mike St.Johns suggested consideration of the use of ``threshold
     keying'', in the distribution of initial secrets.  Threshold keying
     is a standard security technique (see Denning's book on Computer
     Security), in which the keys are split into multiple ``shadow''
     parts.  The parts could be distributed separately and then
     recombined to obtain the initial secret.  Use of this technique
     would allow an administration to, for example, have a single shadow
     key which would be manually entered into each agent at install
     time, and another shadow key calculated by the nms so as to be
     agent-specific and distributed to the agent; these two parts could
     then be combined to get the initial secret.  The advantages would
     be the ability to have the manually distributed secret information
     be a) the same for all agents, and b) different from the secret
     used as the initial key.  The disadvantage being the special
     first-time-only processing the agent would need to recombine the
     keys.  The meeting agreed to consider the suggestion in parallel
     with other activities.

   o The differences between MD4 and MD5 were discussed, and the pros
     and cons of using each.  A suggestion was made to update the text
     of the SNMP Security Protocols document to replace occurrences of
     ``SNMP MD4 Authentication Protocol`` by ``SNMP Digest
     Authentication Protocol'' in discussions of all parts of the
     protocol except the particular digest algorithm used, where the use
     of ``MD4'' would be retained.  This suggestion was accepted since
     it would minimize the text (e.g.  to one page) which would be
     needed in a future memo specifying alternative digest algorithms.

   o A question on ``wildcard'' parties (analogous to the ``public''
     community) was answered by discussing the ``initial'' noAuth,noPriv
     parties defined by convention in the Party MIB. A lively discussion
     ensued on the access rights to be afforded to this out-of-the-box
     noAuth,noPriv party.  Some argued for allowing read-access to

                                   1





     everything in the MIB (except SNMP security's secret information);
     others for allowing read-access to nothing, or just to MIB-II's
     system group.  The consensus of the discussion seemed to be for
     this working group to stay silent on the issue, and let the various
     Requirements working groups make device-type specific
     recommendations.  The Router Requirements WG. is making such a
     recommendation for use of ``public'' communities, and knows it will
     have to update that recommendation as and when the SNMP Security
     documents are further along.

   o A discussion was held on the protocol's use of ASN.1 tags instead
     of a version number field.  The same conclusion was reached as in
     previous discussions of the same topic.

   o The term ``random values'' in the section of the SNMP Security
     Protocols document discussing what to do when an agent loses its
     knowledge of a secret, was clarified as being the need to set the
     values to non-valid or non-guessable values.



There was discussion of the implementation experience gained so far:


   o Three separate implementations were in various stages of
     incompletion, and one other person had spent some preparing for an
     implementation.  Two of these implementations interoperated with
     each other using noAuth,noPriv.  Two had implemented MD4.  One was
     using DES but was unsure that the encrypted data was correct.  To
     date, there is no experience with multiple MIB views, proxy, clock
     synchronization, nor SNMP access to the Party MIB.

   o A couple of ASN.1 definitions were discussed for possible
     optimizations:

      -  The replacement of ANY by a CHOICE in types of AuthInformation,

      -  The specification of a fixed length for the OCTET STRING
         containing the digest value, and

      -  The rearrangement of the authentication information and the
         source/destination party fields leading to the removal of one
         of the levels of serialization.


     There was also discussion of the present access-control
     granularity, and its ability to scale.  The definition of MIB
     subviews does allow access control on individual instances, but at
     the cost of entering each object instance in the View Table.  There
     is a legitimate requirement to support several Views each
     containing all the variables in, for example, the ifTable for just
     one interface.  This requires a large number of entries in the View

                                   2





     Table even with only a moderate numbers of interfaces.

     The document editors agreed to update the documents to reflect the
     (minor) changes resulting from the above discussions.  These
     updates are expected to be available by the end of August.

     Finally, there was discussion of where to go next.  The general
     consensus of the meeting was that SNMP Security was too important
     and central to the technology for us to recommend progression in
     the standards track with the present incomplete levels of
     implementation experience.  When asked how many other
     implementation efforts were planned for the near future, a half a
     dozen attendees raised their hands.  These and others were strongly
     encouraged to proceed with these implementations in order to gain
     the required experience.  Interoperability testing of such
     implementations across the Internet, and at the Interop '91
     SNMP-demo ``staging'' event were discussed and encouraged.


Attendees

Steve Alexander          [e-mail]
Karl Auerbach            [e-mail]
Doug Barlow              [e-mail]
James Barnes             [e-mail]
Steve Bostock            [e-mail]
Howard Brown             [e-mail]
Theodore Brunner         [e-mail]
John Burruss             [e-mail]
Jeffrey Case             [e-mail]
Gigi Chu                 [e-mail]
John Cook                [e-mail]
Tracy Cox                [e-mail]
Emil Datability
James Davin              [e-mail]
Jeffrey Edelheit         [e-mail]
Gary Ellis               [e-mail]
Bill Fardy               [e-mail]
Barbara Fraser           [e-mail]
Jeff Fried               [e-mail]
Deborah Futcher          [e-mail]
Maria Gallagher          [e-mail]
Shawn Gallagher          [e-mail]
James Galvin             [e-mail]
Ron Jacoby               [e-mail]
Mike Janson              [e-mail]
Frank Kastenholz         [e-mail]
Manu Kaycee              [e-mail]
Mark Kepke               [e-mail]
Kenneth Key              [e-mail]
Christopher Kolb         [e-mail]
Deidre Kostick           [e-mail]
Bobby Krupczak           [e-mail]

                                   3





Cheryl Krupczak          [e-mail]
Nik Langrind             [e-mail]
Anthony Lauck            [e-mail]
Tim Lee-Thorp            ngc![e-mail]
Ron Mackey               [e-mail]
Keith McCloghrie         [e-mail]
Evan McGinnis            [e-mail]
Lynn Monsanto            [e-mail]
Bradford Parker          [e-mail]
David Perkins            [e-mail]
John Pickens             [e-mail]
Brian Price              [e-mail]
Anil Rijsinghani         [e-mail]
Kary Robertson           [e-mail]
Jonathan Saperia         [e-mail]
Mark Schaefer            [e-mail]
John Seligson            [e-mail]
Ron Sharp                [e-mail]
Anil Singhal             [e-mail]
Mark Sleeper             [e-mail]
Michael St.  Johns       [e-mail]
Bob Stewart              [e-mail]
Bruce Taber              [e-mail]
Ronald Tencati           [e-mail]
Glenn Trewitt            [e-mail]
Theodore Tso             [e-mail]
William Versteeg         [e-mail]
David Waitzman           [e-mail]
Steven Waldbusser        [e-mail]
Drew Wansley             [e-mail]
David Ward               [e-mail]
Mark Wood                [e-mail]
Brian Yasaki             [e-mail]
Jeff Young               [e-mail]
Joseph Zur               fibrontics![e-mail]



                                   4