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NATs are also firewalls. I think people forget that before NATs, when you would install Windows, the minute you connected it to the internet, you had to rush to
by cm2187 16d ago
NATs are also firewalls. I think people forget that before NATs, when you would install Windows, the minute you connected it to the internet, you had to rush to update it before a virus would infect it. The OS of the 90s weren't secure enough to be exposed to the WAN.
- talideon 16d agoNATs are not firewalls. Any firewall-like functionality provided by NAT is entirely accidental and better provides by an actual NAT.
- icedchai 16d agoThere are really two things here: 1) The typical "NAT" is a "PAT", which requires state for mapping traffic flow. An implementation is going to look very similar to a stateful firewall, by necessity, not accident. 2) The use of RFC-1918 addresses behind the router / NAT box provides some protection. If your address is not globally reachable, it's much harder to reach any hosts behind it. Yes, a poor implementation might allow direct routing from adjacent networks, like your ISP or neighbor. But that still isolates you from 99.99% of the internet.
- talideon 15d agos/actual NAT/actual firewall/
- icedchai 16d agoWindows wasn't secure enough. I ran Linux, *BSD, and Solaris systems for years without any firewalls, host or otherwise.