alt Hacker NewsNo, the side effect of NAT is that outbound connections made from your network look like they come from the router's WAN IP. It doesn't filter incoming traffic.
If it did then you might have a point, but since it doesn't it's very different from a firewall that's configured to do that.
> No, the side effect of NAT is that outbound connections made from your network look like they come from the router's WAN IP.
That's the primary function of NAT, not a side effect.
> It doesn't filter incoming traffic.
Of course it does, it drops any incoming traffic for which it cannot find a corresponding connection. How is this not a filter?
I know that internally these two are vastly different. The reality is that NAT is used as protection for millions of home networks.