NATs, PATs, and Network Hygiene

While reading a research paper on address spoofing from 2019, I ran into this on NAT (really PAT) failures—

In the first failure mode, the NAT simply forwards the packets with the spoofed source address (the victim) intact … In the second failure mode, the NAT rewrites the source address to the NAT’s publicly routable address, and forwards the packet to the amplifier. When the server replies, the NAT system does the inverse translation of the source address, expecting to deliver the packet to an internal system. However, because the mapping is between two routable addresses external to the NAT, the packet is routed by the NAT towards the victim.

The authors state 49% of the NATs they discovered in their investigation of spoofed addresses fail in one of these two ways. From what I remember way back when the first NAT/PAT device (the PIX) was deployed in the real world (I worked in TAC at the time), there was a lot of discussion about what a firewall should do with packets sourced from addresses not indicated anywhere.

If I have an access list including 192.168.1.0/24, and I get a packet sourced from 192.168.2.24, what should the NAT do? Should it forward the packet, assuming it’s from some valid public IP space? Or should it block the packet because there’s no policy covering this source address?

This is similar to the discussion about whether BGP speakers should send routes to an external peer if there is no policy configured. The IETF (though not all vendors) eventually came to the conclusion that BGP speakers should not advertise to external peers without some form of policy configured.

My instinct is the NATs here are doing the right thing—these packets should be forwarded—but network operators should be aware of this failure mode and configure their intentions explicitly. I suspect most operators don’t realize this is the way most NAT implementations work, and hence they aren’t explicitly filtering source addresses that don’t fall within the source translation pool.

In the real world, there should also be a box just outside the NATing device that’s running unicast reverse path forwarding checks. This would resolve these sorts of spoofed packets from being forwarding into the DFZ—but uRPF is rarely implemented by edge providers, and most edge connected operators (enterprises) don’t think about the importance of uRPF to their security.

All this to say—if you’re running a NAT or PAT, make certain you understand how it works. Filters are tricky in the best of circumstances. NAT and PATs just make filters trickier.