> An inbound firewall for all traffic has exactly the same security level as NAT. I've seen at another of these discussions an argument that an inbound firewal

> An inbound firewall for all traffic has exactly the same security level as NAT. I've seen at another of these discussions an argument that an inbound firewall is actually stronger. Suppose you have a NAT router with 192.168.1.0/24 as its "inside" network, and 203.0.113.0/24 as its "outside" network, doing NAT between them. Now suppose another host at the 203.0.113.0/24 network sends a packet to this router, with a destination address within the 192.168.1.0/24 network. A router which only does NAT would accept and deliver this packet, while a router with a correctly configured firewall would reject it.