NAT: Network Address Translation
December 2, 2002
Introduction:
NAT is sometimes referred to as Transparent Proxying, IP Address Overloading, or IP Masquerading. You'll know why, when you look at the NAT operation.
In an IP network, each computer is allocated a unique IP address. In the current version of IP protocol, IP version 4, an IP address is 4 bytes. Since an address is 4 bytes, the total number of available addresses is 2 to the power of 32 = 4,294,967,296. This represents the total theoretical number of computers that can be directly connected to the Internet. In practice, the real limit is much smaller for several reasons. The actual number of available addresses is smaller (somewhere between 3.2 and 3.3 billion) because of the way that the addresses are separated into classes, and because some addresses are set aside for multicasting, testing or other special uses.
While the number of available addresses seems large, the Internet is growing at such a pace that it will soon be exhausted. While the next generation IP protocol, IP version 6, allows for larger addresses, it will take years before the existing network infrastructure migrates to the new protocol.
Because IP addresses are a scarce resource, most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will only allocate one address to a single customer. In majority of cases this address is assigned dynamically, so every time a client connects to the ISP a different address will be provided. Big companies can buy more addresses, but for small businesses and home users the cost of doing so is prohibitive. Because such users are given only one IP address, they can have only one computer connected to the Internet at one time. With an NAT gateway running on this single computer, it is possible to share that single address between multiple local computers and connect them all at the same time. The outside world is unaware of this division and thinks that only one computer is connected.
Forms of NAT:
Static NAT - Mapping an unregistered IP address on your internal network to a registered IP address on a one-to-one basis. Particularly useful when a device needs to be accessible from outside the network.
Dynamic NAT - Maps an unregistered IP address on your internal network to a registered IP address from a group of registered IP addresses.
Overloading - A
form of dynamic NAT that maps multiple unregistered IP addresses to a single
registered IP address by using different ports. This is known also as PAT
(Port Address Translation), single address NAT or port-level multiplexed NAT.
We discuss this form in the next section.
Overlapping - When
the IP addresses used on your internal network are registered IP addresses
in use on another network, the router must maintain a lookup table of these
addresses so that it can intercept them and replace them with registered unique
IP addresses. It is important to note that the NAT router must translate the
"internal" addresses to registered unique addresses as well as translate
the "external" registered addresses to addresses that are unique
to the private network. This can be done either through static NAT or by using
DNS and implementing dynamic NAT.
NAT Operation:
The basic purpose of NAT is to multiplex traffic from the internal network and present it to the Internet as if it was coming from a single computer having only one IP address.
The TCP/IP protocols include a multiplexing facility so that any computer can maintain multiple simultaneous connections with a remote computer. It is this multiplexing facility that is the key to single address NAT. To multiplex several connections to a single destination, client computers label all packets with unique "port numbers". Each IP packet starts with a header containing the source and destination addresses and port numbers:
Source address - Source port - Destination address - Destination port
This combination of numbers completely defines a single TCP/IP connection. The addresses specify the two machines at each end, and the two port numbers ensure that each connection between this pair of machines can be uniquely identified.
Each separate connection is originated from a unique source port number in the client, and all reply packets from the remote server for this connection contain the same number as their destination port, so that the client can relate them back to its correct connection. In this way, for example, it is possible for a web browser to ask a web server for several images at once and to know how to put all the parts of all the responses back together.
A modern NAT gateway must change the Source address on every outgoing packet to be its single public address. It therefore also renumbers the Source Ports to be unique, so that it can keep track of each client connection. The NAT gateway uses a port mapping table to remember how it renumbered the ports for each client's outgoing packets. The port mapping table relates the client's real local IP address and source port plus its translated source port number to a destination address and port. The NAT gateway can therefore reverse the process for returning packets and route them back to the correct clients.
When any remote server responds to an NAT client, incoming packets arriving at the NAT gateway will all have the same Destination address, but the destination Port number will be the unique Source Port number that was assigned by the NAT. The NAT gateway looks in its port mapping table to determine which "real" client address and port number a packet is destined for, and replaces these numbers before passing the packet on to the local client. This process is completely dynamic. When a packet is received from an internal client, NAT looks for the matching source address and port in the port mapping table. If the entry is not found, a new one is created, and a new mapping port allocated to the client:
Incoming packet received on non-NAT port:
Packets received on the NAT port undergo a reverse translation process:
Each client has an idle time-out associated with it. Whenever new traffic is received for a client, its time-out is reset. When the time-out expires, the client is removed from the table. This ensures that the table is kept to a reasonable size. The length of the time-out varies, but taking into account traffic variations on the Internet should not go below 2-3 minutes. Most NAT implementations can also track TCP clients on a per-connection basis and remove them from the table as soon as the connection is closed. This is not possible for UDP traffic since it is not connection based.
Many higher-level TCP/IP protocols embed client addressing information in the packets. For example, during an "active" FTP transfer the client informs the server of its IP address & port number, and then waits for the server to open a connection to that address. NAT has to monitor these packets and modify them on the fly to replace the client's IP address (which is on the internal network) with the NAT address. Since this changes the length of the packet, the TCP sequence/acknowledge numbers must be modified as well. Most protocols can be supported within the NAT; some protocols, however, may require that the clients themselves are made aware of the NAT and that they participate in the address translation process. [Or the NAT must be protocol-sensitive so that it can monitor or modify the embedded address or port data]
Because the port mapping table relates complete connection information - source and destination address and port numbers - it is possible to validate any or all of this information before passing incoming packets back to the client. This checking helps to provide effective firewall protection against Internet-launched attacks on the private LAN.
Each IP packet also contain checksums that are calculated by the originator. They are recalculated and compared by the recipient to see if the packet has been corrupted in transit. The checksums depend on the contents of the packet. Since the NAT must modify the packet addresses and port numbers, it must also recalculate and replace the checksums. Careful design in the NAT software can ensure that this extra processing has a minimal effect on the gateway's throughput. Before doing so it must check for, and discard, any corrupt packets to avoid converting a bad packet into a good one.
Uses of NAT:
Security:There are a number of security issues related to the Internet. Most personal computer operating systems are not designed with security in mind, leaving them wide open to attacks from the Internet. For example, it is now possible for an applet or Active X control to take control of a computer it is running on. Many times it is not even possible to detect that such applets are running. The security implications of this are very serious. For home users, this means that sensitive personal information, such as emails, correspondence or financial details (such as credit card or cheque numbers) can be stolen. For business users the consequences can be disastrous.
To combat the security problem, a number of firewall products are available. They are placed between the user and the Internet and verify all traffic before allowing it to pass through. This means, for example, that no unauthorised user would be allowed to access the company's file or email server. The problem with firewall solutions is that they are expensive and difficult to set up and maintain, putting them out of reach for home and small business users.
NAT automatically provides firewall-style protection without any special set-up. That is because it only allows connections that are originated on the inside network. This means, for example, that an internal client can connect to an outside FTP server, but an outside client will not be able to connect to an internal FTP server because it would have to originate the connection, and NAT will not allow that. It is still possible to make some internal servers available to the outside world via inbound mapping, which maps certain well known TCP ports (e.g.. 21 for FTP) to specific internal addresses, thus making services such as FTP or Web available in a controlled way.
Many TCP/IP stacks are susceptible to low-level protocol attacks such as the recently-publicised "SYN flood" or "Ping of Death". These attacks do not compromise the security of the computer, but can cause the servers to crash, resulting in potentially damaging "denials of service". Such attacks can cause abnormal network events that can be used as a precursor or cloak for further security breaches. NATs that do not use the host machine protocol stack but supply their own can provide protection from such attacks:
Administration:IP networks are more difficult to set up than local desktop LANs; each computer requires an IP address, a subnet mask, DNS address, domain name, and a default router. This information has to be entered on every computer on the network; if only one piece of information is wrong, the network connection will not function and there is usually no indication of what is wrong. In bigger networks the task of co-ordinating the distribution of addresses and dividing the network into subnets is so complicated that it requires a dedicated network administrator.
NAT can help network administration in several ways:
To summarise, a NAT gateway
can provide the following benefits:
A proxy is any device that acts on behalf of another. The term is most often used to denote Web proxying. A Web proxy acts as a "half-way" Web server: network clients make requests to the proxy, which then makes requests on their behalf to the appropriate Web server. Proxy technology is often seen as an alternative way to provide shared access to a single Internet connection.
The main benefits of Web proxying are:
Both these benefits only become apparent in situations where multiple clients are very likely to access the same sites and so share the same data.
Unlike NAT, Web proxying is not a transparent operation: it must be explicitly supported by its clients. Due to early adoption of Web proxying, most browsers, including Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator, have built-in support for proxies, but this must normally be configured on each client machine, and may be changed by the naive or malicious user.
Web proxying has the following disadvantages: