On Jun 4, 2007, at 11:32 AM, Jim Shankland wrote:
Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> writes:
There's no security gain from not having real IPs on machines. Any belief that there is results from a lack of understanding.
This is one of those assertions that gets repeated so often people are liable to start believing it's true :-).
Maybe because it _IS_ true.
*No* security gain? No protection against port scans from Bucharest? No protection for a machine that is used in practice only on the local, office LAN? Or to access a single, corporate Web site?
Correct. There's nothing you get from NAT in that respect that you do not get from good stateful inspection firewalls. NONE whatsoever.
Shall I do the experiment again where I set up a Linux box at an RFC1918 address, behind a NAT device, publish the root password of the Linux box and its RFC1918 address, and invite all comers to prove me wrong by showing evidence that they've successfully logged into the Linux box? When I last did this, I got a handful of emails, some quite snide, suggesting I was some combination of ignorant, stupid, and reckless; the Linux box for some reason remained unmolested.
That doesn't prove that NAT had anything to do with the security. NAT implies stateful inspection. I could conduct the exact same experiment with a Linux box behind a stateful inspection firewall with legitimate addresses and achieve the exact same result. NAT did nothing for you. Stateful inspection is where you got your security. I'm so tired of people who fail to understand that NAT has nothing to do with security, because they forget that stateful inspection is required in order to make NAT work. However, NAT is not required for stateful inspection to work. Owen