On 2/17/24 10:26 AM, Owen DeLong via NANOG wrote:
On Feb 16, 2024, at 14:20, Jay R. Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
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From: "Justin Streiner" <streinerj@gmail.com> 4. Getting people to unlearn the "NAT=Security" mindset that we were forced to accept in the v4 world. NAT doesn't "equal" security.
But it is certainly a *component* of security, placing control of what internal nodes are accessible from the outside in the hands of the people inside. Uh, no… no it is not. Stateful inspection (which the kind of NAT (actually NAPT) you are assuming here depends on) is a component of security. You can do stateful inspection without mutilating the header and have all the same security benefits without losing or complicating the audit trail.
Exactly. As I said elsewhere, the security properties of NAT were a post-hoc rationalization. In the mean time, it has taken on its own life as if not NAT'ing (but still having stateful firewalls) would end the known security universe. We can seriously lose NAT for v6 and not lose anything of worth. Mike