7 ms·
NATs are not firewalls. Any firewall-like functionality provided by NAT is entirely accidental and better provides by an actual NAT.
by talideon 16d ago
NATs 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 16d agos/actual NAT/actual firewall/