The dangers of Fibre Channel sniffers

The dangers of Fibre Channel sniffers

I have heard that tools that sniff Fibre Channel packets are readily available and a security threat. Is this true?

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You are correct that sniffing is always one of the main threats. Fibre Channel sniffers can copy WWNs over the FC, the primary source of authentication in storage networks. All this begs the need for encrypting sensitive traffic over the FC. There is good work underway at T11 (FC SP) to address this issue.

This was first published in January 2005