As someone who has carried a pocket knife for most of my life, I very rarely think of the knife as a weapon. When I was younger, me and my friends would throw knives at trees. Sometimes we would throw hatchets at trees. It's fun and very satisfying to finally stick the knife/hatchet.
I worry about the loss of the implicit firewall that NAT offers.
Network security audits of dual-stack networks far too often show practically no open ports on IPv4, because of NAT, while IPv6 exposes everything. The security through obscurity of the practically unscannable IPv6 address space is not a firewall.
> but the default configuration on many ISP-supplied routers has no firewalling beyond what NAT offers
Repeat after me: NAT does not provide firewalling in any way.
What you think as 'firewalling' is just inability to route packets to your LAN[0] for someone further than your immediate gateway and this is true only until you have no active inbound NAT sessions.
If for some reason there is a session what allows anyone to contact the machine on your LAN (ie Full Cone NAT) then... anyone can contact your machine behind the NAT. I'm not sure there any router or appliance what would do that automatically anymore (because by default outbound session would create a thing called Address and Port Restricted NAT in TFA) but it's quite easy to do this by misconfiguration or some automatic mechanism, like UPnP.
If the problem is in the 'default configuration of many ISP-supplied routers' then you really should address that and not treat NAT as a firewall.
And last, but not least: every modern OS comes with a built-in firewall. Even Windows' one is pretty decent to block anything not explicitly allowed. There is no network scanning in IPv6, it's pointless or requires to sit on the wire to listen for NDP - and at this point NAT wouldn't help, too.
[0] or sometimes the packets are routed pretty fine in, it's just the absence of the state and/or proper rules what forbids the answer to be routed back. If you ever needed to troubleshoot an assymetric NAT you would know this.
ADD: this should had been a reply for your further comment, of course, but I leave it here.
The scenerio I commonly see is a dual-stack (IPv4 & IPv6) router blocking all unsolicited incoming IPv4 packets (because of NAT), while all IPv6 LAN hosts will unintentionally be globally accessible through the internet.
This is why I worry about more IPv6 deployment. Too many people are ignorantly relying on IPv4 NAT as a layer of protection.
> Too many people are ignorantly relying on IPv4 NAT as a layer of protection.
Too many people think pulling out works every time, too many people think what not using the seat belts because they aren't going far or fast is safe, yada, yada.
What the attack scenario? For the most part the machine is firewalled anyway by built-in firewall (if we talking about any modern Windows and Linux) by default. Most attacks need the actual vulnerable software and this is the browser nowadays => it's client initiated anyway.
Sure, a properly configured router would block the incoming traffic (with or without NAT, there are routed IPv4 too, you know? I have five /24 there and a bunch of smaller ones, no NAT on them), but again, the onus here on the default configuration of the router. There are still 'DMZ' buttons in some routers what would DNAT everything to the machine, there are people who do that without understanding what this opens up their machine (despite being behind the NAT) ie 'make it globally routable'..
I didn't touch home/soho routers for almost a decade so I can't say anything about that, except what Zyxels have the sane defaults and what Mikrotik is shipped with IPv6 disabled altogether.
Don't forget, most of the 'hacks' are happening by scanning the IPv4 subnet and then meticulously probing everything. It's easy with IPv4 (hell, /16 is only 65k hosts), with IPv6 this is...
Here: 2a10:1fc0:6::/48
I have a machine there, go, find it.
The only feasible way for someone to find your globally addressable machine is for the 'victim' is to first trigger something, eg by accessing some website. Yes, in this case the owner of the site (or the malware which infected the site) would know your IP. But same applies to IPv4 and in both cases you need something which is:
vulnerable
accepting packets from anywhere
not firewalled
And you still need to lure the victim to your site first.
You would have more chances with sending Nigerian prince letters and you would be way more profitable.
> And you still need to lure the victim to your site first.
You don't need to lure anything. Hack some websites. Plenty have publicly accessible analytics or logs. That gives you full IPv6 addresses to target. Ideally, it might give you a username as well.
What if someone gets the logs of an IOT cloud provider with IPv6 enabled IOT devices?
How many of those addresses have SSH, Samba, APFS, Telnet, or a DNS server running? How many have a username + password combo that's in a leak? How many have an IOT Restful API endpoint with unpatched vulnerabilities?
IPv4 NAT allows people to have quite weak security internally in a network, and not get compromised. Device firewalls don't work where the devices themselves provide services, which is increasingly common.
Right. For example, in 2016, Shodan had sneakily infiltrated the NTP.org pool to harvest IPv6 IPs. The methods have obviously gotten more sophisticated and more prevalent since then.
> IPv4 NAT allows people to have quite weak security internally in a network, and not get compromised
DENY from ANY to ANY
on the WAN port works with both IPv4 and IPv6 and allows people to have a strong security internally in the network.
Here, one simple solution, works on both IP versions, does not rely on NAT or hoping everything would be fine.
> How many of those addresses have SSH, Samba, APFS, Telnet, or a DNS server running?
Ah, yes, some idiots have the telnet and APFS running and open to the whole world that's why NAT to the rescue! Instead of, you know, having a brain and, at least, firewalling. At The Router.
You all NAT apologists somehow do have the router with NAT and firewall for IPv4, but at the same time there is only luminiferous æther for IPv6 with nothing between the poor, young and defenseless IoT device and the 3vi1 h4x0r somewhere on the other side of the planet. Come on.
> What if someone gets the logs of an IOT cloud provider with IPv6 enabled IOT devices?
What if someone gets in your house and find your nudes? Should we ban cameras everywhere, because someone might do that?
Thanks to privacy extensions most of those logged addresses will have expired and be useless. Also most people don't permit connections from the Internet to privacy addresses in the first place, they only add firewall exceptions for the base addresses, so even if you're running a server on the same machine you make an outbound connection from, the servers you connect to don't learn the IP needed to make an inbound connection on.
> IPv4 NAT allows people to have quite weak security internally in a network, and not get compromised.
No, it doesn't. This is allowed by having a firewall on the router, exactly the same as in v6. NAT doesn't block connections, so it doesn't contribute to this security.
Device firewalls do work, but connections will generally be rejected by the router's firewall before they even get that far.
> I worry about the loss of the implicit firewall that NAT offers.
... NAT does not offer 'implicit firewall'
It's just what Average Hacker somewhere on the net can't route easily into your local network. If this is no longer an Average Hacker or he is sitting on your wire then the only thing what your NAT 'offers' is your false sense of security.
And by the way, nobody, noone forbade you from having explicit firewall rules denying anything from anywhere, not explicitly allowed. Just like it is done in a proper IPv4 configuration.
> And by the way, nobody, noone forbade you from having explicit firewall rules denying anything from anywhere, not explicitly allowed. Just like it is done in a proper IPv4 configuration.
Sure, in a perfect world, migrating to IPv6 should be safe, but the default configuration on many ISP-supplied routers has no firewalling beyond what NAT offers.
I won't say there aren't ISP routers without firewalling, but for the most part they're pretty decent at having it. It's just that the firewalling is a completely separate thing to NAT.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
The article says: "The problem of aiming to be a privacy focused service means a high level of scrutiny is required. We are not talking about meme providers like NordVPN here; we are talking about a company who needs to do better."
So he's claiming that Mullvad gets things right that other providers get wrong, but they're still missing a critical step.
At the end: "All in all, Mullvad VPN appears to have put expanding the number of locations over user privacy. That points to a bigger problem in the VPN industry. That is a lack of a perfect provider. Mullvad VPN has multiple hops available but AzireVPN chooses their upstream carefully, runs everything from RAM and uses a custom made TPM-Level Rootkit that blocks common network monitoring features in Linux but does not offer real Multi-hop (Only though Socks5 proxy)."
So every problem has a solution, but no VPN is offering all of them. But I suspect that's because VPNs are mainly for downloading movies and shitposting on the internet.
>VPNs are mainly for downloading movies and shitposting on the internet.
or not giving your ISP a list of which websites you visited when in a situation where you could only get internet by agreeing to allow the ISP to analyze your traffic and sell the result
or to avoid regional legal restrictions which are not on the level of "if you are found out you have major problems" like non GDPR compliant US sites blocking EU users and you are from the US on holiday in the EU (most such sites are very US-local specific)
or to avoid doggy price differences depending on from where you buy something
The whole article is theoretical in nature (and light in substance). This is probably just who the author wanted to sign up for, then they discovered the common caveat of all VPN providers.
Nope, that same author has tons of papers about exfiltrating data from air gapped systems using many different mechanisms. Copycat is the wrong way of thinking about it. All different but do the same kind of thing.
The value is pretty limited when the answer is consistently and predictably "Yes".
The author is clearly an expert in exfiltration and has deep insights in the area. But instead of working on presenting the big picture, prefers to throw breadcrumbs to the community. After a dozen of "exfiltration using X" papers, one would at least expect an SoK paper.
I know of at least two security-related workshops that explicitly call for "negative results". So, even failures in this research field are definitely publishable, if accompanied with adequate insights.
