The value to be used as the Authentication Key whenever the corresponding instance of rip2IfConfAuthType has the value simplePass- word. A modification of the corresponding in- stance of rip2IfConfAuthType does not modify the rip2IfConfAuthKey value. If a string shorter than 16 octets is supplied, it will be left-justified and padded to 16 oc- tets, on the right, with nulls (0x00). Reading this object always results in an OCTET STRING of length zero; authentication may not be bypassed by reading the MIB object.