NAT Router Quasi Firewall

J

jackz4000

New Member
How does an NAT router prevent incoming intrusion attempts? I have a BEC 7402 with the router internal firewall disabled and in 3 weeks Zonealarm has not logged a single attempt of intrusion....nothing incoming to block. Previously, I would get 20 blocked attempts per day. It seems that even with the router internal firewall disabled that the router itself is some kind of firewall.

How does this work? Thanks, JK
 
Intrusion attempts are unsolicited traffic, when the router receives some it doesn't know where it is supposed to go so it is ignored.

NAT works by remembering where outgoing traffic came from and is going to and it forwards the response there
 
The by-design nature of a NAT is what provides most of the protection, by simply dropping packets that are not responses to requests initiated by machines behind the NAT.

My router isn't advertised as having a firewall but the NAT itself is essentially a firewall due to the very nature of how it works. I'm not sure what extra protection routers that have a firewall will give since NAT practically does the job of a firewall.
 
technically NAT is not a firewall, but a feature developed to fix the on going and growing number if IP addresses in use. It stands for Network Address Translation.

Since it basically translates data from one subnet to another with out them ever seeing or connecting to each other if offers security. Remote hosts that try to connect to you can not because they don't know any information about the network behind NAT.

I can explain better when there is more time
 
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