Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by curryst 1760 days ago
> Though I'm really at a loss as far as network security and firewalls go. I've been setting up firewalls with NAT for 20 years, but I'm still not sure how its all going to work with IPv6. In the mean time, I just disable all IPv6 stuff on the firewall machines, and try not to worry about it.

Hopefully you've heard this before, and I'm sorry if I'm beating a dead horse, but NAT is not a firewall. It does render hosts behind the NAT not connectable from the Internet by default, but that's because they're unroutable not a security feature.

I.e. there was a bug a while ago that let people send UPnP requests over WAN to your router, which makes your hosts suddenly routable. NAT won't stop that from happening and your hosts are basically internet-accessible. A firewall configured to only allow outbound connections would have stopped that.

So if you consider NAT a routing feature, it works the same it always did. You configure the firewall to only allow outbound connections, unless you have a specific reason to allow inbound connections. I don't actually know if it's less secure. NAT required kind-of targeted attacks to exploit, but the IP space for v6 is large enough I would expect a dramatic drop in probe traffic. There are 3.4 * 10^38 addresses. It's just too large of a space to casually scan.