Today in our newest take on “older technology is better”: why NAT rules!

  • FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    Maybe I have Stockholm Syndrome, but I like NAT. It’s like, due to the flaws of IPv4 we basically accidentally get subnets segmented off, no listening ports, have to explicitly configure port forwarding to be able to listen for connections, which kinda implies you know what you’re doing (ssshh don’t talk about UPnP). Accidental security of a default deny policy even without any firewalls configured. Haha. I’m still getting into this stuff though, please feel free to enlighten me

    • Domi@lemmy.secnd.me
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      2 months ago

      Anything connected to an untrusted network should have a firewall, doesn’t matter if it’s IPv4 or IPv6.

      There’s functionally no difference between NAT on IPv4 or directly allowing ports on IPv6, they both are deny by default and require explicit forwarding. Subnetting is also still a thing on IPv6.

      If anything, IPv6 is more secure because it’s impossible to do a full network scan. My ISP assigned 4,722,366,482,869,645,213,696 addresses just to me. Good luck finding the used ones.

      With IPv4 if you spin up a new service on a common port it usually gets detected within 24h nowadays.

      • Forbo@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        I wouldn’t rely on the size of the address space to provide security. It’s possible to find hosts through methods other than brute force scanning. I remember seeing a talk from a conference (CCC? DEF CON? I can’t remember) where they were able to find hosts in government IPv6 address space (might have been DOD?) through stuff like certificate transparency logs and other DNS side channels.

        Man, I need to go find that talk now…

        Edit: I don’t think this is the one I saw previously but is in a similar vein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AayifEqLbhI

    • Thiakil@aussie.zone
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      2 months ago

      Instead of nat and port forwards that rewrite, your firewall is set to only forward specific traffic, exactly how’d you’d configure outbound forwarding on a nat network (but opposite directions)

      Open forwarding is a router, not a firewall

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      2 months ago

      Every time I see a defense of IPv4 and NAT, I think back to the days of trying to get myself and my roommate to play C&C: Generals together online, with a 2v2 game, with one of us hosting. Getting just the right combination of port forwarding working was more effort than us playing C&C: Red Alert on dial up when we both lived at home.

      With IPv6, the answer is to open incoming traffic on the port(s) to the host machine (or just both since the other guy is might host next time). With IPv4, we have to have a conversation about port forwarding and possibly hairpin routes on top of that. This isn’t a gate for people “who know what they’re doing”, it’s just a bunch of extra bullshit to deal with.