SNMP Vulnerability Analysis and Suggested Countermeasures for Wireless Networks

Abstract

Securing any network infrastructure is like securing possible entry points of attacks on a country by deploying appropriate defense. Network security is an ongoing process that helps keep unauthorized parties from gaining access to the network. Any networked system where security or privacy protection of assets is valued needs security experts to protect and control it.

Wireless technologies represent a rapidly emerging area of growth and importance for providing ubiquitous access to the network for all of the user community. Because of great convenience and flexibility provided by wireless networks, the popularity of wireless networks has surged dramatically over the recent few years. Recently, industry has made significant progress in resolving some constraints to the widespread adoption of wireless technologies. Some of the constraints have included disparate standards, low bandwidth, and high infrastructure and service cost. Wireless is being adopted for many new applications: to connect computers, to allow remote monitoring and data acquisition, to provide access control and security, and to provide a solution for environments where wires may not be the best solution.

The increasing popularity of wireless networks has opened organizations up to new security threats and many traditional countermeasures are ineffective in dealing with them. Though wireless networks offer great benefits, they are more susceptible to attacks and require more protection than their wired counterpart. The fundamentals of network security remain the same in wireless networks also; it is still based on the three A's: · Authentication of users, also known as access control. · Authorization for access to network services and domains. · Accounting of network activity, also known as auditing.

In wireless networks, data is broadcast in the open air, and it is impossible to have physical controls over the transmission boundaries. That makes eavesdropping or active attacks more easier than in wired networks, and hence security becomes the major concern in wireless networking. Since deployment of wireless network technologies in public places bears the danger of unauthorized users gaining access to network services, it is extremely crucial to be able to restrict access to the network only to authorized users.

An attack on a wireless network is an attempt to exploit a particular vulnerability or number of vulnerabilities that exist in it. Therefore, there is a great need to incorporate security in wireless networks. In order to make the wireless network secure, the vulnerabilities present in it need to be identified so that the security problems can be resolved before they can be exploited. One such vulnerability arises due to the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) used to manage the network devices.

As SNMP is the most widely used network management protocol, it is natural to adopt SNMP-based management solutions for WLANs. SNMP is a request-response protocol that collects management information from network devices and provides a way to set and monitor configuration parameters in a wireless network. This enables the automatic reporting of access point faults to remote IP addresses, together with remote configuration over the network. Like many network protocols, SNMP has some associated vulnerabilities. This work investigates the behavior of SNMP in wireless networks and highlights the issues of information security due to the SNMP vulnerabilities present in the wireless networks.