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Network Address Translation (NAT) Service
6-18
6.7
Network Address Translation (NAT) Service
6.7.1
Synopsis
The NAT service allows for the establishment of a home virtual network that
is isolated from and protected from the external public network. It provides a
port based address translation function that allows all the clients on the home
network to share a single public IP address. Thus, multiple clients can share
the same ISP account.
6.7.2
Operation
The TCP/IP stack contains both a network address translation module as well
as an IP filtering model. When the translation service is enabled, any packet
received from a client on a virtual network that is destined for the external pub-
lic network is adjusted to use the stack’s public IP client address.
The translation is performed by allocating a translation record and holding it
for a period of time. The translation records are timed out based on their proto-
col. In TCP, records are timed out based on the state of their TCP connection.
UDP and ICMP translations timeout based on when they were last used.
In addition to translation, the stack contains an additional IP filter option (al-
ways enabled by this service) that filters packets from the public network from
being seen by the private network. For example, if someone on a public net-
work knew the IP address and the subnet mask of the router’s (stack in route
mode) private network, it could set a gateway route to the router’s public IP
host address and the router would route packets from the public to the private
network and back (internally its does not distinguish between public and pri-
vate while routing). The IP filter prevents this. It also prevents an entity on a
public network from accessing protocol servers (like HTTP or Telnet) that are
running on the private network. This allows the router to present different
HTTP or Telnet interfaces to the public than it does to clients in the home.
The NAT service is executed on the public interface – i.e., the interface which
is assigned valid public IP host address (used to carry traffic for the virtual cli-
ent addresses). There can only be one instance and Thus, only one public IP
address, but the service will can serve multiple the virtual (home) networks in
the system so long as they can be combined and still exclude the public IP. If
the combination of these networks results in an overlap with the public net-
work, the service fails.
For example, assume interface “If–1” is connected to the physical network
128.32.12.x/255.255.255.0, and there are two home networks