SNMPv1 1988

#SNMPv1 is defined by RFC 1065 - 1067 which specify as a protocol supporting stand-alone Management Station or Manager and Management Agent. Limited but easily implemented Management Information Base (MIB) of scalar variables and two dimensional tables are defined. It is designed to be a streamlined (simple but efficient) protocol with limited functionality such as allows only centralised network management. The connection between the manager and agent is done using User Datagram Protocol (UDP)#.

SNMPv1 uses community, a relationship between a SNMP manager and a set of SNMP agents, to establish trust between them. It provides three aspects of agent control including: authentication service#, access policy#, and proxy service. This is later inherited by its successor SNMPv2 1993#. However, it has a major security issue as it transmits a password, called “community string”, in cleartext to authenticate clients.

Get commands are atomic in SNMPv1.

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Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)

SNMPv1 1988#
SNMPv3 1998

#SNMPv3, defined by RFC 2570 - 2575, addresses security issues of #SNMPv1 1988 and #SNMPv2 1993 by using User Security Model (USM), including overall architecture and security capability. It provides authentication service# that is part of User-Based Security (UBS), privacy# (Data Encryption Standard (DES) message encryption), and Access Control# to allowed operations, device information, and Management Information Base (MIB) access.
SNMPv2 1993

#SNMPv2, later revised in 1996, is a revision to #SNMPv1 1988 specified by RFC 1901 - 1908 which supports distributed network and adds more functionality to it. It improves the performance, security, confidentiality, and manager-to-manager communications.