White Papers

Dell EMC Technical White Paper
For more information about SMB and the versions, see the following Microsoft blog:
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/josebda/2013/10/02/windows-server-2012-r2-which-version-of-the-smb-
protocol-smb-1-0-smb-2-0-smb-2-1-smb-3-0-or-smb-3-02-are-you-using
More details about the features listed earlier are as follows:
• Password encryption and authentication is improved by using the stronger HMAC-MD5
algorithm (NTLMv2) compares to the previous DES algorithm (LAN Manager).
• Reduced Commands – There are 19 commands, which reduces complexity of the protocol
implementation and exposure to attacks.
• Improved message signing and signing is per user. HMAC SHA-256 is used instead of MD5 as
the hashing algorithm.
• Larger reads and writes better utilize faster networks even with high latency.
• Improved scalability for file sharing; the number of users, shares, and open files per server is
increased.
• Durable handles - Allows a stateful connection to be reestablished if there are network issues.
• SMB2 allows client-side caching of folder and file properties.
• Compounding requests - Allows multiple requests to be sent in a single packet. This method is
also called pipelining.
• Supports SMB direct (SMBv3 over RDMA), which improves performance.
• SMBv3 uses AES-CMAC message signing, which is more secure.
• SMBv3 allows optional encryptions of packets using AES-CCM encryption standard.