this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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Given how large the address space is, it's super easy to segregate out your networks to the nth degree and apply proper firewall rules.
There's no reason your clients can't have public, world routeable IPs as well as security.
Security via obfuscation isn't security. It's a crutch.
There are a lot of valid reasons, other than security, for why you wouldn't want that though. You don't necessarily want to allow any client's activity to be traceable on an individual level, nor do you want to allow people to do things like count the number of clients at a particular location. Information like that is just unnecessary to expose, even if hiding it doesn't make anything more secure per se.
Well good news. Because ipv6 has a thing called privacy extensions which has been switched on by default on every device I've used.
That generates random ipv6 addresses (which are regularly rotated) that are used for outgoing connections. Your router should block incoming connections to those ips but the os will too. The proper permanent ip address isn't used for outgoing connections and the address space allocated to each user makes a brute force scan more prohibitive than scanning the whole Ipv4 Internet.
So I'm going to say that using routable ipv6 addresses with privacy extensions is more secure than a single Ipv4 Nat address with dnat.
NAT is not an obsfucation, it's a proper security.
Uh, how? Fundamentally I disagree. I'd recommend reading the many other comments on this post for more context.
NAT is the basic principle behind a VPN. You isolate your machines from the network completely. I mean, if you want them to have internet access, then you don't need NAT, but if you want to isolate them and only have internal access, then why bother with IPv6 and setting up some weird firewall rules?
But I agree that NAT use cases are rare.