Ubuntu Manpage: snmpkey - Create SNMPv3 security keys for the Net::SNMP module

Provided by: libnet-snmp-perl_6.0.1-5_all

NAME

       snmpkey - Create SNMPv3 security keys for the Net::SNMP module

USAGE

       The "snmpkey" utility generates security keys based on a password and an
       authoritativeEngineID passed on the command line.  This key can then be used by the
       Net::SNMP module instead of the plain text password when creating SNMPv3 objects.

          snmpkey <authProto> <password> <authEngineID> [<privProto> [<password>]]

DESCRIPTION

       The User-based Security Model used by SNMPv3 defines an algorithm which "localizes" a
       plain text password to a specific authoritativeEngineID using a one-way hash.  This
       resulting key is used by the SNMP application instead of the plain text password for
       security reasons.

       The Net::SNMP module allows the user to either provide a plain text password or a
       localized key to the object constructor when configuring authentication or privacy.  The
       "snmpkey" utility can be used to generate the key to be used by the -authkey or -privkey
       named arguments when they are passed to the Net::SNMP "session()" constructor.

REQUIRED ARGUMENTS

The "snmpkey" utility requires at least three command line arguments. The first argument
defines which hash algorithm to use when creating the authKey. Either HMAC-MD5-96 or
HMAC-SHA-96 can be specified with the string 'md5' or 'sha' respectively. This choice
must match the algorithm passed to the -authprotocol argument when creating the Net::SNMP
object. The second argument is the plain text password that is to be localized to create
the authKey. The third required argument is the authoritativeEngineID of the remote SNMP
engine associated with the Net::SNMP argument -hostname. The authoritativeEngineID is to
be entered as a hexadecimal string 10 to 64 characters (5 to 32 octets) long and can be
prefixed with an optional "0x".

The last two arguments are optional and can be used to determine how the privKey will be
generated. By default, the fourth argument assumes a value of 'des' corresponding to the
default privacy protocol defined in the User-based Security Model. The Net::SNMP module
supports CBC-3DES-EDE and CFB128-AES-128 as alternatives to the default protocol CBC-DES.
These protocols can be chosen by specifying the string '3des' or 'aes' respectively. This
choice must match the protocol passed to the -privprotocol argument when creating the
Net::SNMP object. The last argument can be used to specify the plain text password that
is to be localized to create the privKey. If this argument is not specified, the authKey
password is used.

AUTHOR

       David M. Town <dtown@cpan.org>

LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT