Security performance analysis of SNMPv3 with respect to SNMPv2c

Abstract

SNMPv3 has just become a full standard and more and more the scientific community and the market are looking for information on its performance and related new built-in authentication and privacy features. It is sure that SNMPv3 security services (authentication and privacy) require additional CPU usage, memory and message exchange which could cause consistent performance degradation. In order to understand if performance issue could be an obstacle for the wide deployment of SNMPv3 in the commercial world, a set of measurements have been done and presented in this paper. The research evaluates the impact experienced by the network appliance, due to the computational load added by the message authentication and encryption, and analyzes the variation of the protocol overhead at different security levels introduced by SNMPv3. This work shows the results of a set of performance measurements done both with SNMPv2c and SNMPv3 managers in order to acquire results with respect to processing time, number of transactions per minute, CPU usage and protocol overhead. We discovered that SNMPv3 introduces a progressive computational load as soon as it uses security function but this additional load seems still acceptable, but if the discovery process is not implemented carefully, then the extra load becomes prohibitive. This paper suggests a way to minimize the extra load introduced by the discovery process, thereby improving protocol performance.