Custom

How to use the feature “ENCRYPTION and DECRYPTION OF INVENTORY DATA”

Background

In the past, we had no way to decrypt or encrypt our inventory files (* .snowpack).

This is useful for customers with specific security requirements.

Previous Solution:

By default, our Snow Inventory Agent uses a standard key to encrypt (*.snowpack) files.

This key is hard coded in both Snow Inventory Agent for encryption and Snow Inventory Server for decryption. This standard key is the same for all customers and therefore cannot be given to any customer.

All customers had to contact Snow Support to decrypt their own inventory files.

This was very time consuming,

New Solution:

Snow has now created the possibility to create your own encryption keys.

How does it work?

With the tool AESKEYGEN, you can create your own custom crypto keys for a certain agent or group of computers. The tool creates a key that needs to be copied to a folder on the Inventory server as well as to a folder on the computers to be inventoried. The file is named <fingerprint>.cryptkey.

Run aeskeygen.exe <Path> to create your own crypto key

The result is shown

Use this setting in the configuration file of the Inventory server (snowserver.config) to specify the folder where the crypto keys are located:

To specify the fingerprint of the crypto key to use for Snowpack encryption, use these settings in the configuration file of the agent (snowagent.config), and the folder where it is located.

Deploy your Agent with your created crypto key.

With the tool SNOWPACK-UTIL, you can decrypt your generated (*.snowpack) files

Use it with the following options:

The unpack command will decrypt the file and unpack the content to a sub-folder of the current folder. To unpack the content, use the following syntax:

The pack command will generate a new snowpack file based on the content of a specified folder and encrypt it with the fingerprint of your custom key.

To generate a file, use the following syntax:

Note1:

• Both tools can be ordered from Snow Support

Note2:

• The encryption level is AES128 bit

Note3:

• You cannot handle inv files with the tools.

Note4:

• The snowpack-util cannot decrypt the default encryption key

Note5:

• The standard snow encryption and decryption always works.

Best practices naming your Custom Fields

Custom fields are a useful way to help customize Snow License Manager to display information in a way that is relevant to you and your organization.

To create a custom field, you will go into Administration in SLM:

Under administration you will find Custom Fields, click it to get into configuration and then click “Add custom field”:

You will then be presented with a pop-up window where you will name your Custom field, set the Category, Type, an optional Description field and a check box for if the field should be Mandatory.

The different Categories:

The different Types for all Categories:

When it comes to naming your fields, it usually makes sense to call them to something self-explanatory for what they are going to be used for, e.g. ‘Agreement Period’, ‘License’ or ‘PVU’.

However, some names could be considered “reserved” by Snow, and they could cause problems with future versions and when upgrading Snow License Manager.

A real scenario:

In a recent customer upgrade, who was going from SLM 9.1 to 9.2 through SUS, it failed and logged an error saying that it couldn’t upgrade to a duplicate value of ‘PVU’. This was identified to be the name of a Custom Field, and when that name was changed, the upgrade went through without any issues.

The recommendation is to give it some thought when naming your Custom Fields, and to choose a name that makes sense to your organization and what it should be used for. Then give it a name that will make it unique, e.g. ‘Customername_CustomFieldName’.

Example:

For more information on Custom Fields and how to configure them, please see the SLM user guide:

User Guide: Web User Interface Snow License Manager version 9 (en-us)

https://snowprod.service-now.com/support/?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0019253

User Guide: SLM Web User Interface - Update revision 8.3

https://snowprod.service-now.com/support/?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0011767