Community strings and controlling access to MIB objects

Community strings can be given the access rights "read-only", "read-write" etc. In accordance with these access rights, SNMP requests containing this community string may read objects defined as "read-only" and read and change objects defined as "read-write". If there are no further precautions, all accessible objects can be read or all changeable objects can be read and changed.

Recommendation

Use the option of assigning selective read or write privileges to specific community strings, for:

• MIB branches

• objects

• object instances (in tables)

Recommendation

If the environment of your SNMP agents and management platform(s) allows you to do so, use the user-specific authorization available in the SNMPv3 protocol.