>NAT isn’t actually a security feature
Perhaps not in the high brow network security world, but in practice it really is used that way.
Who here has never launched an unauthenticated server on their LAN?
Perhaps not in the high brow network security world, but in practice it really is used that way.
Who here has never launched an unauthenticated server on their LAN?
Back then our ISP gave every computer a public IP.
The next thing that happened was that someone changed my MySQL password, and me being 12, I didn’t know how to change it back.
They made me beg for the password, to much amusement to the whole channel, and then they helped me secure it and taught me how to reset the password.
NAT would have saved me, but I wouldn’t have received a free, though a bit embarrassing, security lesson.
I've see some argue that a hypothetically buggy router would somehow be less likely to fail if NAT was used but really, that could be equally said about bad port formatting defaults, which have in fact happened. Complexity is what increases the likelihood of bugs at the end of the day.
NAT is just an addressing hack, a weirdly complex way of indirectly routing to local addresses. It only influences what is written on the envelope, not how that envelope is processed at the post office.