Security of all system and network management functions and the communication of all management information is important. As shown in Table 4.4, the OSI security architecture enumerates three areas of security management:
1 | System security management |
2 | Security service management |
3 | Security mechanism management |
System security management addresses the management of the overall distributed computing environment.
Security service management addresses the management of security services. This service provides for the invocation of specific security mechanisms using appropriate security mechanism management functions.
Security mechanism management addresses the management of security mechanisms.
In short, a network management station is a system that supports a network management protocol and the applications necessary for it to process and access information from managed entities on the network. Examples of network management protocols include the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and the Common Management Information Protocol (CMIP). Today, SNMP is by far the most widely used network management protocol on the Internet.
Keep in mind that the OSI security architecture has not been developed to solve a particular network security problem, but to provide the network security community with a terminology that can be commonly used to describe and discuss security-related problems and corresponding solutions. We will use the terminology to further describe solutions for specific intranet and Internet security problems in the remainder of this book.
Team-Fly |