In message <29838609.2919.1321392184239.JavaMail.root@benjamin.baylink.com>, Ja y Ashworth writes:
If your firewall is not working, it should not be passing packets.
And of course, things always fail just the way we want them to.
Your stateful firewall is no more likely to fail open than your header-mutilating device.
Please show your work.
Prove to me that all NAT won't pass packets not addressed directly to it. Show your work. You are making assumptions about how the NAT is designed. Many NATs only take packets addressed to particular address ranges and process them though the state tables. All the rest of the packets are treated as normal traffic which may or may not be forwarded depending apon the way the base platform is configured which is usually as a router. Many NAT's will honour LSR. Unless you know the internals of a NAT you cannot say whether it fails open or closed. Given that most NATs only use a small set of address on the inside it is actually feasible to probe through a NAT using LSR. Most attacks don't do this as there are lots of lower hanging fruit but if it is a targeted attack then yes you can expect to see LSR based attacks which depending apon how the NAT is built may pass through it without even being noticed. Now can we put to bed that NAT provides any real security. If you want security add and configure a firewall. That firewall can be in the same box as the NAT. It can use the same state tables as the NAT but it is the firewall, not the NAT functionality, that provides the protection. Mark
Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.co m Designer The Things I Think RFC 210 0 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DI I St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 127 4
-- Mark Andrews, ISC 1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: marka@isc.org