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Any network engineer will tell you that NAT is an illusion of security. It's the job of a firewall to prevent routing to private networks. The issue with IPv4
by Jonnax 5y ago
Any network engineer will tell you that NAT is an illusion of security.
It's the job of a firewall to prevent routing to private networks.
The issue with IPv4 is that there is a limited amount of addresses so we've had to make do.
With IPv6, every device in the world can have millions of IP addresses which are globally routeable.
However we're only at about 33% of traffic being IPv6 capable. [0]
On the mobile phone side, it's a choice by network providers to prevent routing. More of a security thing than anything else.
There is a product class called Mobile Private Network, which offers private networks over mobile to businesses.
My personal hot take for the low uptake of IPv6 is that there's a lot of people in the industry that have the attitude of "I don't need it so nobody else does which informs management"
You can see it when people bring up the low upload speeds and someone says "5mbps is all you need for video conferencing". Ignoring how it's painful to upload videos or other binary data for collaboration.
[0] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6-adoption https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=ipv6...
- tremon 5y agoThe parent's point wasn't about NAT being a security mechanism or not, but about the routability problems posed by NAT.
- Jonnax 5y agoApart from the lack of public IPv4 addresses, the other reason that people cite for NAT use is security. IPv6 does not need NAT.
- intergalplan 5y ago> Any network engineer will tell you that NAT is an illusion of security. That "illusion" was pretty damn effective at taking Windows, around '00, from "pwned in minutes, no user action required" to "won't get pwned unless you click the wrong thing".
- Jonnax 5y agoWell that was 20 years ago. A smart washing machine is more powerful that a computer from 2000. :P
- intergalplan 5y agoSure, but it's still handy that consumer routers with no extra config protect the smart washing machines connected to them from drive-by unpatched remote exploits, just by having NAT on by default.
- Jonnax 5y agoI'm not sure I understand what you mean here. Let's say you had two routers. 1 with NAT and 1 without. They both will have a firewall that by default blocks incoming traffic. So they are functionally equivalent.
- intergalplan 5y agoCould be true, these days. Didn't used to always be, at least on consumer hardware, though I've not seen a non-NATing Internet-connected consumer network in most of two decades.