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No, the reason is that people incorrectly believe it provides security. It doesn't actually do that.
by Dagger2 15d ago
No, the reason is that people incorrectly believe it provides security.
It doesn't actually do that.
- tptacek 14d agoI know that's an article of faith among networking people but it's not actually true.
- Dagger2 14d agoIt is true. NAT only changes the source address used for outbound connections, it doesn't deny inbound ones. You don't need to take that on faith either -- you can just test it.
- tptacek 14d agoGo ahead, make an inbound connection to my dev laptop. I'll even give you the IP address: it's 192.168.8.21.
- Dagger2 14d agoGet me onto the network that's on the WAN interface of your router, disable the firewall on it, and I will. How do you want to go about doing this? Although, 100% of the time people have asked me to do this they chicken out at actually doing it, so I suppose you will too. You might prefer to test with some network namespaces instead.