The Access Control System of Network Management Information Base

MIB(Management Information Base), one of the key components of network management system, is a conceptual repository for the information of the various managed objects. MIB stores and manages all the structural and operational data of each managed resources. Therefore, MIB should be protected properly from inadvertant user access or malicious attacks. International standard ISO/IEC 10164-9 describes several managed object classes for the enforcement of MIB security. Those managed object classes described access control rules for security policy. But the exact authorization procedures using those newly added managed object classes are not presented. In this paper, we divide managed object classes into two groups, explicit and implicit ones, and describe the access authorization procedure in Z specification language. Using Z as a description method for both authorization procedure and GDMO's action part, the behaviour of each managed object class and access authorization procedure is more precisely and formally defined than those of natural language form.