Security issues and vulnerabilities of the SNMP protocol

Currently, communication networks are composed of many interconnected heterogeneous resources and network management plays a critical role. A complete network management solution must be simple, intuitive, easy to use and consistent. It also should ensure ease of deployment, security and the ability to deploy additional solutions quickly. Especially, the security of the network management is probably the most important attribute since it is likely to affect the total security of a system. In this paper, we attempt to shed some light on many issues involved with the security of network management by exploring the security vulnerabilities and threats that the current management schemes have.