A Note On Security

The preceding discussion leads into another very important area: that of attacks against networks and management system components . The sheer quantity of attacks against networks is surprising ”thousands are independently recorded annually. An entire book could be dedicated to this subject. Networks can be subjected to the following types of attacks, among many others:

• Hacking : Attempting to gain unauthorized access to agent data (as above)

• Denial of service : Flooding an agent with bogus messages, such as GetRequest s

• Message interception : Listening for and capturing messages in transit

• Message modification : Modifying the contents of messages in transit

• Message replay : Capturing and then resending messages

It is surprising how unprotected many networks are [CERTWeb], and the emphasis on security is certain to increase. Protection must be applied throughout the network from the very top of the management system software pyramid (introduced in Chapter 1) to the NEs and agents deployed in the network.

We now move onto our second sample program, this time using Java.