Secure LAN management with SNMPv2 over IPsec

SNMPv2 is the most popular Network Management Protocol for its simplicity, wide support in most of the Operating Systems and network devices. The weakness in SNMPv2 was lack of proper security mechanism which led to the improved version SNMPv3 in 1999 [1]. It required separate PKI infrastructure and lacked support in older network devices so it could not get wide popularity and adaptation. Therefore several alternate security proposals for securing SNMPv2 like use of IP Security (IPsec), TLS and SSH have been presented. In this paper we have presented a method of securing SNMPv2 based communication using IPsec, customized for SNMP packets only, without affecting other traffic in a LAN environment. We have also analyzed performance of this approach with the insecure SNMPv2 based communication and found that it incurred only 8.5% more delay and 1.2% to 1.4% extra overheads.