Sun Management Center Change Manager 1.0 Administration Guide

Using Sun Management Center Probe Connection to Retrieve Bulk Data From Managed Hosts

Change Manager uses a private protocol between the Sun Management Center server and agent to perform particular management operations. This protocol relies on a Sun Management Center "probe connection," which provides a data stream between server and agent. The probe mechanism relies on standard Sun Management Center authentication to ensure proper access to the Change Manager components on the agent. The agent must be properly configured and must be in the appropriate server context before a probe connection can be established.

Identity

The server and the agent are in a "trusted" relationship according to Sun Management Center server context security.

Authentication

The user must be authorized on the server. An interloper might eavesdrop on the initiation of the probe connection and grab credentials from the agent during initial handshake. This ability would allow unauthenticated access to the agent from a rogue server. Access by a rogue agent to server data through this mechanism is impractical, according to standard Sun Management Center server context security mechanisms.

Authorization

An authenticated Sun Management Center user must have SNMP-set and SNMP-write access to the Change Manager Management Information Base (MIB). This access is managed by agent-side Access Control Lists (ACLs) according to Sun Management Center. The default access enables any authorized Change Manager user to have access to the Change Manager MIB.

Confidentiality

Same as for Sun Management Center, which means little or no confidentiality.

Integrity

Data is vulnerable to productive corruption attacks.

Availability

Flood attacks and corruption attacks might disrupt service. Service might be disrupted by unauthorized use of a snooped connection startup request. The interruption of Change Manager processes on an agent causes management operations to fail. Excessive system load or other resource constraints on an agent can affect Change Manager processes.

Accountability

Data transfers are logged by both the Change Manager server and the managed host, including managed host identification and the responsible user.