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Cole_McDonald's avatar
Cole_McDonald
Icon for Professor rankProfessor
2 years ago

SNMPv3 Password Character Set Restrictions?

I’m working on adding a hundred or so Long Strong SNMPv3 passwords into a class of device we’re going to start monitoring.  I’m can walk the snmp locally, from a linux neighbor, but not from LM.  I’m...
linux
password
snmp
  • kendall's avatar
    kendall
    2 years ago

    Hi @Stuart Weenig !

    Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the question, but everyone from Oracle to Cisco to IBM advises that a a privacy password  “must contain exactly 8 characters in length and include any combination of alphanumeric characters (uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and numbers)”. Actually, it may just be Oracle that says “exactly” 8 because IBM and others indicate 8-32. it is my understanding that the length is determined by the level of the encryption algo used, so AES would require less characters than AES128 or 256, etc. 

     https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E37444_01/html/E37449/gpqnr.html

    I can’t say if this information is outdated or not. The current RFC standard is here: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3411 I have not had time to comb through this for info, though.

Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
2 years ago

Hi Cole!

According to the multiple industry sources as well as our internal docs, snmp v3 requires a password the length of 8 bytes/characters only and exactly. So if you’re trying with a longer value for snmp.privToken, this may be the issue.

Hope this helps!

I doubt this as well, I’ve used SNMPv3 passwords that were much longer. What’s your source?