V-215696

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

snmp-server group V3GROUP v3 auth read V3READ write V3WRITE 
snmp-server view V3READ iso included
snmp-server view V3WRITE iso included
snmp-server host x.x.x.x version 3 auth V3USER

Authentication used by the SNMP users can be viewed via the show snmp user command as shown in the example below.

R4#show snmp user

User name: V3USER
Engine ID: 800000090300C2042B540000
storage-type: nonvolatile active
Authentication Protocol: SHA
Privacy Protocol: None
Group-name: V3GROUP

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