Authentication, encryption, and context

With SNMPv3, several additional features are available. Most notably, one may choose strong authentication and encryption of communication. For authentication, Zabbix currently supports the following methods:

• Message-Digest?5?(MD5)?algorithm?
• Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA)

For encryption, Zabbix supports these:

• Data Encryption Standard (DES)
• Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)

While it seems that one might always want to use the strongest possible encryption, keep in mind that this can be quite resource intensive. Querying a lot of values over SNMP can overload the target device quite easily. To have reasonable security, you may choose the authNoPriv option in the Security level drop-down menu. This will use encryption for the authentication process but not for data transfer.

Another SNMPv3 feature is context. In some cases, one SNMP endpoint is responsible for providing information about multiple devices—for example, about multiple UPS devices. A single OID will get a different value, depending on the context specified. Zabbix allows you to specify the context for each individual SNMPv3 item.