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> Alright. Most consumer routers do both NAT and firewalling, especially in their stock configurations, but I can drag one out and disable the firewall on it to

> Alright. Most consumer routers do both NAT and firewalling, especially in their stock configurations, but I can drag one out and disable the firewall on it to test with. Nope firewall on. You're still missing the point. Consumers will disable their client firewall once it interferes with something they're trying to do. A physical NAT device with a firewall won't allow this easy circumvention as those who don't know what they're doing won't generally go mucking around their router settings. They will click a button though, and if they have malware on their machine they can disable it via software means. Firewalls are also software, and just like all software they have bugs. There's an old one where sending certain DNS queries through windows firewall would disable it entirely. > v6 doesn't necessarily push the firewall to clients. You can and generally do still firewall on your router. Again you're not thinking of the entirety of the changes here. v6 on its own won't, but the entire point of global link addresses is to avoid NAT and other things. Further, the firewall must remain, but it must be easily and programmatically configured. This leaves pushing it to the client, or leaving exactly what we have today. > I know you can cut the search space down somewhat, but it's still massively bigger than v4, and therefore it's still going to be harder to find servers via scanning in v6 than in v4. NAT won't help in the slightest with this. NAT won't, but a firewall will. > the large address space reduces exposure simply by making it harder to find any listening servers. Reduces exposure, but does not eliminate it. Agreed though, it is harder to scan ip6 space than ip4, but not impossible

Dagger2 5y ago
I was under the impression that the point was "NAT blocks connections", and I was attempting to point out that it doesn't. Testing with the firewall on will only demonstrate that the router blocks connections when the firewall is enabled (which is expected), it won't demonstrate that the connections aren't being blocked by NAT. People are still running with firewalls on their routers in v6; that's the default basically everywhere. > Reduces exposure, but does not eliminate it. Agreed though, it is harder to scan ip6 space than ip4, but not impossible Yup, it's definitely not impossible, but it should be hard enough that the majority of the few unfirewalled Windows machines won't be found, which should weaken botnets rather than strengthen them.

Dagger2 5y ago

I was under the impression that the point was "NAT blocks connections", and I was attempting to point out that it doesn't. Testing with the firewall on will only demonstrate that the router blocks connections when the firewall is enabled (which is expected), it won't demonstrate that the connections aren't being blocked by NAT. People are still running with firewalls on their routers in v6; that's the default basically everywhere. > Reduces exposure, but does not eliminate it. Agreed though, it is harder to scan ip6 space than ip4, but not impossible Yup, it's definitely not impossible, but it should be hard enough that the majority of the few unfirewalled Windows machines won't be found, which should weaken botnets rather than strengthen them.