Designing and Managing Behavior Models - NerveCenter Support for SNMP v3 - Overview of NerveCenter SNMP v3 Support - NerveCenter Support for SNMP v3 Security -
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NerveCenter Support for SNMP v3 Security

SNMP v3 specifications enable any two devices to communicate in a completely secure fashion using message authentication to validate users and encryption to ensure the secrecy of the communication. SNMP v3 provides a User-based Security Model (USM) to establish authentication and secrecy.

NerveCenter supports three security levels for communicating with an SNMP v3 agent:

• NoAuth/NoPriv: Passwords for authorization and privacy are not required to communicate with the agent. NerveCenter still requires the user name and context for polling.
• Auth/NoPriv: The authorization protocol and password are required to communicate with the agent. NerveCenter requires the user name, context, and authentication password for polling.
• Auth/Priv: All security parameters are required to communicate with the agent. NerveCenter requires the user name, context, and the privacy and authentication passwords for polling.

Communication between any two SNMP v3 entities takes place on behalf of a uniquely identified user within the management domain. The security level used for this communication defines the kind of security services -- message authentication and encryption -- used while exchanging data. NerveCenter communicates with SNMP v3 nodes on behalf of the NerveCenter poll user in the poll context. By default, the user name is NCUser and the context is NCContext, though you can change both in NerveCenter.

If you do not specify a security level for an SNMP v3 node, NerveCenter uses a default security level of NoAuthNoPriv, which means that message authentication and encryption services are not used for data exchange with the node. You can later change the security level in NerveCenter.

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Note    The NerveCenter poll user, context, authentication password, and privacy password can be changed in NerveCenter Administrator. If you change the passwords, you can update this information on all nodes directly from the NerveCenter Administrator.

The security level used by NerveCenter while polling SNMP v3 nodes is configured for each node in NerveCenter Client. Information specific to nodes, such as version, security level, and authentication protocol, are entered in NerveCenter Client for the node.

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