Cisco Systems SRW248G4PK9NA User Manual

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Security: Secure Sensitive Data Management
Configuration Files
369
Cisco Small Business 300 Series Managed Switch Administration Guide 
18
A device determines whether the integrity of a configuration file is protected by 
examining the File Integrity Control command in the file's SSD Control block. If a 
file is integrity protected but a device finds the integrity of the file is not intact, the 
device rejects the file. Otherwise, the file is accepted for further processing.
A device checks for the integrity of a text-based configuration file when the file is 
downloaded or copied to the Startup Configuration file. 
Read Mode
Each session has a Read mode. This determines how sensitive data appears. The 
Read mode can be either Plaintext, in which case sensitive data appears as 
regular text, or Encrypted, in which sensitive data appears in its encrypted form.
Configuration Files
A configuration file contains the configuration of a device. A device has a Running 
Configuration file, a Startup Configuration file, a Mirror Configuration file 
(optionally), and a Backup Configuration file. A user can manually upload and 
download a configuration file to and from a remote file-server. A device can 
automatically download its Startup Configuration from a remote file server during 
the auto configuration stage using DHCP. Configuration files stored on remote file 
servers are referred to as remote configuration files. 
A Running Configuration file contains the configuration currently being used by a 
device. The configuration in a Startup Configuration file becomes the Running 
Configuration after reboot. Running and Startup Configuration files are formatted 
in internal format. Mirror, Backup, and the remote configuration files are text-based 
files usually kept for archive, records, or recovery. During copying, uploading, and 
downloading a source configuration file, a device automatically transforms the 
source content to the format of the destination file if the two files are of different 
formats. 
File SSD Indicator
When copying the Running or Startup Configuration file into a text-based 
configuration file, the device generates and places the file SSD indicator in the 
text-based configuration file to indicate whether the file contains encrypted 
sensitive data, plaintext sensitive data or excludes sensitive data. 
The SSD indicator, if it exists, must be in the configuration header file.