NAME

snmpkey - Create a SNMPv3 security key for the Net::SNMP module

SYNOPSIS

The snmpkey utility generates a security key 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 md5|sha1 <password> <authoritativeEngineID>

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.

The snmpkey utility expects three command line arguments. The first argument defines which hash algorithm to use when creating the key. Either MD5 (RFC 1321) or SHA-1 (NIST FIPS PUB 180) can be specified with the string 'md5' or 'sha1' respectively. This choice must match the algorithm passed to the -authprotocol argument when creating Net::SNMP objects. The second argument is the plain text password that is to be localized. The final 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".

AUTHOR

David M. Town <dtown@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2001-2002 David M. Town. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

SEE ALSO

Net::SNMP