IPv6 Part 11: “NAT is not a security feature”

It’s often commented by critics of NAT that it isn’t a security feature. By this they generally mean one of two things. They may mean that “NAT is no substitute for a firewall”. There’s a simple answer to that: it isn’t. It’s true that a connection inbound from the Internet can’t initiate a port-to-internal-address mapping on a NAPT device. Connections can only be initiated in one direction, from the private domain to the global domain, so that a NAPT device acts as a kind of crude one-way filter. However, once the mapping is set up, in principle any datagram with the right destination port will be forwarded to the relevant internal address and port (what happens to it when it reaches that host is another matter).

In reality, at the enterprise perimeter NAPT is typically combined with a (stateful-inspection) firewall, which enforces traffic policy and can check if any datagram is part of a permitted connection. It is however possible that other NAPT devices (like some cheap home routers) may rely upon NAPT’s filtering effect for security. As we increasingly adopt end-to-end IPv6 addressing that will no longer work.

The other thing that NAT’s critics may refer to is the way that NAPT masks our internal network structure:

  • Host identity: because NAPT hides all internal hosts behind one address, it’s impossible to identify how many (active) hosts there are behind that address, or if any two connections are from the same host (there may be higher-level markers such as cookies that make this possible).
  • Network identity: NAPT will conceal which hosts lie on the same internal subnet.
  • Network topology: if you have structured your internal subnet addresses hierarchically to optimise routing then NAPT will conceal that hierarchical structure from the outside world.

IPv6’s end-to-end addressing reveals all that information [UPDATE: if conventional SLAAC addressing is used then it will also reveal the manufacture of the interface hardware]. The critics of NAT assure us that this is irrelevant, as “obscurity is no security” (for example, see Tom Coffeen’s IPv6 Address Planning, chapter 2). This refers to the fundamental principle that the security of your system should not rely upon its design remaining secret: it should remain secure even if the design becomes known. It goes back to the work of the cryptographer Auguste Kerckhoffs, who argued that a cipher should remain secure even if the algorithm became known to the enemy. If it fell into the enemy’s hands then it should only be necessary to issue new keys.

Nevertheless the details of our internal network structure is information that is useful to an attacker. System designers often put considerable effort into preventing the leakage of such information, and I don’t think that it’s wasted. The point is that you should not rely upon the concealment of your internal network structure for security: you certainly should have a firewall and other such measures to protect your systems. However, concealing your internal structure slows down the sophisticated attacker and may confound the naïve (or automated) attacker. As Daniel Miessler puts it, obscurity is a valid security layer. It has a rôle provided that it doesn’t cost you too many operational problems: there’s a pragmatic trade-off here between obscurity and practicality.

Now you can legitimately argue that the advantages of end-to-end addressing outweigh any consequent information leakage, but to simply dismiss concerns about such leakage as “obscurity through security” (one prominent IPv6 consultant refuses to even discuss the matter) is to misunderstand the principle.

In future posts, I’ll look at some of the ways that the drawbacks of IPv6’s end-to-end addressing have been mitigated.

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