alt Hacker NewsThis goes against Hyrum's law. NAT provides the behavior 99.9% of users want, usually by default, out of the box. True firewalls can do the same thing, but not necessarily by default, the firewall might not even by on by default, and there's more room for misconfiguration. IPv6 is a security regression for most people, regardless of its architectural merits or semantics of what's a firewall.
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NAT implementations get broken all the time (NAT slipstreaming attacks). If a manufacturer is incompetent enough not to have a firewall on by default, they are probably also shipping a vulnerable NAT.
I wouldn’t put the number so high. I’ve on several occasions seen not very technical people unnecessarily burn money on VPSes or dedicated hosting providers because they couldn’t expose a game server for a evening session with their friends with the spare capacity on their gaming machine, because of their ISPs NAT setup. 90% would be fairer. However we still shouldn’t be sacrificing securing agency of individual consumers for securing smoother revenue for corporations.
This is a terrible argument. First, NAT doesn't provide the security behavior users want. The firewall on their router is doing that, not the address translation. Second, that firewall is on by default, blocking inbound traffic by default, so why on earth would you conjecture that router manufacturers will suddenly stop doing that if NAT isn't on by default? Third, it's not remotely likely that a user will misconfigure their firewall to not secure them any more. Non-technical users won't even try to get in there, and technical users will know better because it's extremely easy to set up the basics of a default deny config. There is no security regression here, just bad arguments.
It’s still conflating things. You can have a stateless NAT: device x.x.x.y will get outbound source ports rewritten to (orignal port) << 8 + y.
This is a (dumb) NAT but has no state so it cannot possibly implement a default deny or any firewall adjacent features.