V-217337

Discussion

Without authenticating devices, unidentified or unknown devices may be introduced, thereby facilitating malicious activity. Bidirectional authentication provides stronger safeguards to validate the identity of other devices for connections that are of greater risk. A local connection is any connection with a device communicating without the use of a network. A network connection is any connection with a device that communicates through a network (e.g., local area or wide area network, Internet). A remote connection is any connection with a device communicating through an external network (e.g., the Internet). Because of the challenges of applying this requirement on a large scale, organizations are encouraged to only apply the requirement to those limited number (and type) of devices that truly need to support this capability.

Check Content

Review the router configuration to verify that it is compliant with this requirement as shown in the example below.

snmp {
    v3 {
        usm {
            local-engine {
                user R5_NMS {
                    authentication-sha {
                        authentication-key "$8$vOiLX-Vb2oaUwsJDiHmPz3690BcSevM"; ## SECRET-DATA
                    }
                }
            }
        }
        target-address NMS_HOST {
            address x.x.x.x;
            address-mask 255.255.255.0;
            tag-list NMS;
            target-parameters TP1;
        }
        target-parameters TP1 {
            parameters {
                message-processing-model v3;
                security-model usm;
                security-level authentication;
                security-name R5_NMS;
            }
        }
        notify SEND_TRAPS {
            type trap;
            tag NMS;
        }
        snmp-community index1 {
            security-name R5_NMS;
            tag NMS;
        }
    }
} 

If the router is not configured to authenticate SNMP messages using a FIPS-validated HMAC, this is a finding.