It wasn’t designed for a security purpose in the first place. So turn the question around: why does NAT make a network more secure at all?
The answer is that it doesn’t. Firewalls work fine without NAT. Better, in fact, because NAT itself is a complication firewalls have to deal with, and complications are the enemy of security. The benefits of obfuscating hosts behind the firewall is speculative and doesn’t outweigh other benefits of end to end addressing.
The main benefit of a NAT is that by default it prevents all external access to the hosts inside the network. Any port you have open is not accessible unless explicitly forwarded.
This has a lot of security benefits.
Regardless, everything you said is sounds true to me.
Not really, though. It was never designed as a security boundary. You can “open” a UDP port by sending UDP packets to another host, and then that host can send UDP packets to you, for instance. Usually the IP addresses of the two hosts are exchanged through a third party, and that’s how STUN/TURN works in essence. Without this, you’d need to port forward every UDP connection manually, both incoming and outgoing.
NAT only protects you when you have hosts that only communicate along preset routes, but then a normal firewall will also work fine. It’s not like having a public IP means any traffic will actually go through, every modern consumer router has a standard deny all firewall. At best, it sort of hides what devices are sending the traffic.
Meanwhile, NAT has flaws breaking traffic (causing NAT slipstreaming risks, like I linked elsewhere). It also has companies like Nintendo instruct you to forward every single port to their device if you have connectivity issues. If that forward is not towards a MAC address, and your PC gets the IP your Nintendo Switch used to have, you’ve just disabled your firewall to play Animal Crossing.
If you want to, you can do NAT on IPv6. Every operating system supports it, even if it’s a stupid idea.
I still have to initiate the outgoing UDP. Are you talking about the specific case where any software running on my host can initiate it without me requesting?
In the instance of UDP handshakes yes, you need local software to initiate the connection on one of your devices somewhere (I highly doubt that your home router verifies the origin of those packets, so a hacked printer or IoT crap can open ports to your desktop no problem). Other problems are harder to solve.
NAT is great at what it does, but it does not guarantee security. It blocks straightforward attacks, but brings in tons of edge cases and complexity that sophisticated attacks can abuse. At the same time, the same security can be achieved using IPv6 and a firewall without all the complexity.
It’s a neat workaround that means you don’t need to mess with subnetting and routing tables when you do stuff like run virtual machines and when your ISP doesn’t offer IPv6. It was designed so larger businesses with 10 machines could access the internet without spending a lot of money on a /30, not to replace firewalls, and it still works well for what it’s designed to do.
You can get exactly the same benefit by blocking non-established/non-related connections on your firewall. NAT does nothing to help security.
Edit: BTW–every time I see this response of “NAT can prevent external access”, I severely question the poster’s networking knowledge. Like to the level where I wonder how you manage to config a home router correctly. Or maybe it’s the way home routers present the interface that leads people to believe the two functions are intertwined when they aren’t.
Why do you say NAT doesn’t make a network more secure?
It wasn’t designed for a security purpose in the first place. So turn the question around: why does NAT make a network more secure at all?
The answer is that it doesn’t. Firewalls work fine without NAT. Better, in fact, because NAT itself is a complication firewalls have to deal with, and complications are the enemy of security. The benefits of obfuscating hosts behind the firewall is speculative and doesn’t outweigh other benefits of end to end addressing.
The main benefit of a NAT is that by default it prevents all external access to the hosts inside the network. Any port you have open is not accessible unless explicitly forwarded.
This has a lot of security benefits. Regardless, everything you said is sounds true to me.
Not really, though. It was never designed as a security boundary. You can “open” a UDP port by sending UDP packets to another host, and then that host can send UDP packets to you, for instance. Usually the IP addresses of the two hosts are exchanged through a third party, and that’s how STUN/TURN works in essence. Without this, you’d need to port forward every UDP connection manually, both incoming and outgoing.
NAT only protects you when you have hosts that only communicate along preset routes, but then a normal firewall will also work fine. It’s not like having a public IP means any traffic will actually go through, every modern consumer router has a standard deny all firewall. At best, it sort of hides what devices are sending the traffic.
Meanwhile, NAT has flaws breaking traffic (causing NAT slipstreaming risks, like I linked elsewhere). It also has companies like Nintendo instruct you to forward every single port to their device if you have connectivity issues. If that forward is not towards a MAC address, and your PC gets the IP your Nintendo Switch used to have, you’ve just disabled your firewall to play Animal Crossing.
If you want to, you can do NAT on IPv6. Every operating system supports it, even if it’s a stupid idea.
I still have to initiate the outgoing UDP. Are you talking about the specific case where any software running on my host can initiate it without me requesting?
Edit: apparently NAT is full of security bugs
In the instance of UDP handshakes yes, you need local software to initiate the connection on one of your devices somewhere (I highly doubt that your home router verifies the origin of those packets, so a hacked printer or IoT crap can open ports to your desktop no problem). Other problems are harder to solve.
NAT is great at what it does, but it does not guarantee security. It blocks straightforward attacks, but brings in tons of edge cases and complexity that sophisticated attacks can abuse. At the same time, the same security can be achieved using IPv6 and a firewall without all the complexity.
It’s a neat workaround that means you don’t need to mess with subnetting and routing tables when you do stuff like run virtual machines and when your ISP doesn’t offer IPv6. It was designed so larger businesses with 10 machines could access the internet without spending a lot of money on a /30, not to replace firewalls, and it still works well for what it’s designed to do.
You can get exactly the same benefit by blocking non-established/non-related connections on your firewall. NAT does nothing to help security.
Edit: BTW–every time I see this response of “NAT can prevent external access”, I severely question the poster’s networking knowledge. Like to the level where I wonder how you manage to config a home router correctly. Or maybe it’s the way home routers present the interface that leads people to believe the two functions are intertwined when they aren’t.