Comment by wink

18 days ago

I would phrase it as: NAT accidentally "breaks" or "makes harder/impossible" something which yields increased security, under some circumstances.

It doesn't though. NAT edits your outbound connections to appear to come from the router's IP; it doesn't do anything to make inbound connections harder.

  • If you don't initiate a corresponding outbound connection first then any attempt at an inbound connection will be dropped (unless you have a DMZ configured ofc). The router literally can't forward the traffic because it doesn't know where it should go.

    • No, the router doesn't forward it because it doesn't get there in the first place. Your 192.168.1.0/24 private network is not going to be routed across the internet.

    • It might be dropped by a firewall, but not by NAT.

      IP packets have a "destination IP" field in the header. The router knows where to forward packets because it reads that IP out of the header.

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