• @Avatar_of_Self
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    5 months ago

    The word you are looking for is firewall not NAT.

    No the word I’m looking for is the NAT. It was not designed for security but coincidentally it is doing the heavy lifting for home network security because it is dropping packets from connections originating from outside the network, barring of course, forwarded ports and DMZ hosts because the router has no idea where to route them.

    Consumer router firewalls are generally trash, certainly aren’t layer 7 firewalls protecting from all the SMB, printer, AD, etc etc vulnerabilities and definitely are not doing the heavy lifting.

    By and large automated attacks are not thwarted by the firewall but by the one-way NAT.

    • @orangeboats
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      15 months ago

      Consumer router firewalls are generally trash

      [Citation needed]

      They are literally piggybacking on the netfilter module of Linux. I don’t see how that’s trash

      • @Avatar_of_Self
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        5 months ago

        They are not layer 7 firewalls for the network which are going to be where most the majority of attacks are concentrated. No citation needed unless you believe they are layer 7 firewalls or using something like Snort.

        Added some clarification in my first sentence so it makes a bit of sense.

        • @orangeboats
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          15 months ago

          Wait, why are we talking about Layer 7 when NAT and firewalls are Layer 4 at best?

          • @Avatar_of_Self
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            15 months ago

            Because, as I said:

            layer 7 firewalls for the network which are going to be where most the majority of attacks are concentrated.

            The NAT doesn’t have to operate at layer 7 to be effective for this because

            coincidentally it is doing the heavy lifting for home network security because it is dropping packets from connections originating from outside the network, barring of course, forwarded ports and DMZ hosts because the router has no idea where to route them.

            The point is that the SPI firewalls are not protecting against the majority of the attacks we’ve seen for decades now from botnets and other arbitrary sources of attacks, except, perhaps targeted DDoSing which isn’t the big problems for most home networks. They must worry about having their OS’ and software exploited and owned in the background, which doesn’t get much of an assist from a router’s firewall.

            Obviously, this is however true for the NAT since the NAT are going to drop connections originating from outside the network attempting to communicate with that software to exploit it

            barring of course, forwarded ports and DMZ hosts because the router has no idea where to route them.

            • @orangeboats
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              5 months ago

              How is this “dropping packets” not applicable to firewalls, then? You are not just going to casually connect to my IPv6 device as we’re speaking. The default-deny firewall in my router does the heavy lifting… just like what NAT did.

              Honestly, it just sounds like you need to brush up on networking knowledge. Repeat after me: NAT is not security.

              • @Avatar_of_Self
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                5 months ago

                Are you saying that everyone’s router’s firewall drops all packets from connections that originate from outside of their network?

                • @orangeboats
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                  15 months ago

                  It’s a stateful firewall. It simply drops unsolicited packets.

                  • @Avatar_of_Self
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                    15 months ago

                    So, really, you were “correcting” me for you and your specific setup at the very beginning because your router’s firewall has a deny rule for all inbound connections because I must have been confusing what a NAT and what a firewall is because I must have been talking about your specific configuration on your specific devices.

                    Holy. Fucking. Shit.