Subject: Security in RTFM

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 2 Sep 1999 17:01:49 +0200

If usage sensitive billing is used packets should be authenticated to make
sure they come from the customer "registered" with the sender address of the
packet (or some kind of ID). Is this outside the scope of RTFM?

-Marius Clemetsen

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Marius Clemetsen, Telenor
Instituttveien 23, N-2007 Kjeller
Email: [email-masked]
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From: Nevil Brownlee <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 1999 18:03:52 +1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)

> packet (or some kind of ID). Is this outside the scope of RTFM?

Meter security is addressed in the Meter MIB Security Considerations; the 
cleanest way to do it is by using the security features of SNMPv3.
IF there is demand for this in NeTraMet, I'll look at changing it to
use SNMPv3, but that will take some time :)

If, however, you want the meter to only measure packets from 'registered' 
users, i.e. those who have registered with the network being metered, 
this is a significant extension of the RTFM architecture.  Although RTFM 
could look at this, it may better fall within the AAA working group's 
charter ...

Cheers, Nevil

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| Nevil Brownlee                     Director, Technology Development |
| Phone: +64 9 373 7599 x8941        ITSS, The University of Auckland |
|   FAX: +64 9 373 7021      Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand |
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From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Sep 1999 09:14:50 -0400

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>>>>> "marius" == marius clemetsen <[email-masked]> writes:
    marius> If usage sensitive billing is used packets should be authenticated to make
    marius> sure they come from the customer "registered" with the sender address of the
    marius> packet (or some kind of ID). Is this outside the scope of RTFM?

  It is outside the scope of RTFM, and is in general, a difficult problem 
since the trust relationship between the end customer and the meter is not
well defined. If public key operations were cheap, then a PKI could be used,
and every packet could be signed.
  PKI operations are nowhere near that cheap, so for even small bandwidths,
a symmetric key digest must be used, which means that any of the traffic
meters could forge traffic coming from the customer. One has a similar
problem with getting IPsec traffic to cross a firewall, and with
authenticating ICMP messages.

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