A new framework for secure network management

Abstract

We introduce a new protocol, secure network management system (SNMS) with four primary goals. First, use encryption to establish a secure channel between a network manager and a network agent. Second, allow network management tasks to be performed from any station on the network. Third, enable a manager to remotely add manageable objects to an agent. Finally, make a prototype along with a set of guidelines to make a transition from simple network management protocol (SNMP) to SNMS. SNMS combines features from hyper text transfer protocol (HTTP), secure socket layer (SSL) security mechanism, and common gateway interface (CGI) programming techniques, and deals with the entire Web client/server paradigm. Network managers can securely monitor and control the network elements from any station on the network. Compared with SNMP, which does not provide any safety measures for exchanging information between a manager and an agent, SNMS offers a high degree of security by encrypting all the traffic between the manager and an agent. SNMS applies public key and private key encryption and decryption with a mixture of digital signature and two way authentication.